Thousands of Poles marched in Warsaw on Saturday to demand respect for their country’s constitution while denouncing a populist government they accuse of eroding democracy.

Many participants carried Polish and European Union flags during an event promoted as the March of Freedom'' and chanted slogans such asConstitution!” and “Free courts!”

Two pro-European and centrist opposition parties, Civic Platform and Modern, were the key organizers of the protest, along with a pro-democracy civic group.

In speeches, their leaders accused the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party of chipping away at democratic freedoms with an overhaul of the judicial system that gives the party vast powers over the courts.

EU leaders have urged the Polish government to reverse some of the changes. The government insists it has the political mandate to reform a broken justice system.

Civic Platform leader Grzegorz Schetyna said the government’s opponents are fighting for “freedom, dignity, democracy, the constitution, the independence of the Constitutional Tribunal, the independence of courts and Poland in Europe.”

Some protesters held up small copies of the Polish Constitution.

The march was also an attempt by political opposition parties to gain some momentum against the ruling party ahead of local elections this fall and the parliamentary election next year.

“We want to show that we are here, we are together and that we have a plan,” Michal Stasinski, a lawmaker with Civic Platform, told The Associated Press.

City Hall, which is controlled by Civic Platform, said 50,000 people took part. Police called that estimate far too high but did not give their own estimate.

Many march participants also expressed support for a protest that mothers of disabled children have held for more than three weeks in the Polish parliament. The mothers are demanding more state funding to care for their children, but so far have been unsatisfied with what the government has offered them.

Across Warsaw there were other rallies Saturday, including the annual pro-EU Schuman Parade and a march of about 250 farmers, foresters and hunters angry at environmentalists. Some ultra-nationalists turned out for the latter event.
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The Everett House, which serves as the Turkish ambassador’s residence, is a Washington landmark. It is also famous as the one-time home of the Ertegun family, the brothers who would go on to found Atlantic records and change the sound of American jazz and pop music. But the Erteguns also played a role in Washington history by standing with African Americans in what was, at the time, a deeply segregated city. VOA’s Ozlem Tinaz reports.
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Ukrainian separatists in Donetsk on Friday celebrated the fourth anniversary of the city’s self-proclaimed independence from Ukraine with a parade. 

Local residents who support the pro-Russian separatists came to the parade in the city center with black, red and blue rebel flags along with Russian flags.

Ukrainian forces have battled the pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk since 2014. A peace deal in 2015 has been little honored by either side. Ukraine accuses Russia of providing military support for separatists, a charge the Kremlin denies.

Residents at Friday’s parade said they wanted the region to be closer to Russia.

“I went to vote for the independence, for joining Russia. We want to be on the right track. Our course is toward Russia only,” said Svetlana, a Donetsk resident.

Donetsk also held a parade Wednesday to commemorate the victory over Nazi Germany. That parade featured tanks and other heavy weapons despite a ban on that type of celebration by Ukraine’s government.

While large, Soviet-style military parades have been revived under President Vladimir Putin in Russia, they have been banned in Ukraine since the conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions broke out in 2014.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine erupted weeks after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and has left more than 10,000 dead. 
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The Czech centrist ANO party on Friday approved a coalition agreement for a new government with the center-left Social Democrats, subject to a poll of Social Democrat party members.

The minority government would aim to boost spending on defense, wages and benefits as well as infrastructure, according to a policy agenda agreed by leaders of the two parties, which Reuters saw.

It would maintain a pro-Western policy course but keep the country outside the eurozone and resist any EU pressure to accept asylum-seekers transferred from other EU states.

“This is a solid base for the creation of a stable government,” Social Democrat chief Jan Hamacek said after a party leadership meeting.

But the deal still needs the approval of rank-and-file Social Democrats; the outcome of their poll, likely to be announced June 15, is far from certain.

Prime Minister Andrej Babis’ ANO party was the clear winner of an election in October but lacks a majority. The coalition will still be in a minority, with 93 of 200 lower house seats, and require ad hoc backing from the small Communist party.

Most parties, and also some prominent Social Democrats, have rejected joining a cabinet led by the billionaire businessman because he has been charged with fraudulently tapping a European Union subsidy a decade ago. He calls the investigation a plot.

As a condition of forming a coalition, the Social Democrats secured an agreement that Babis will step down if a court finds him guilty in the fraud case.

ANO’s other concessions to the Social Democrats include raising sick pay and child allowances and increasing salaries across the education sector by 50 percent by 2021.

Communist backing

“I think Social Democrat members will respond positively … we made an awful lot of compromises,” Babis said.

If the deal falls through, he said an early election could be held next spring.

The pro-Russia and anti-NATO Communist party has said it would lend the government its 15 votes in the formal confidence vote, which would mark its first involvement in national government since the end of Communist rule in 1989.

The Communists oppose some of the potential coalition’s foreign policy plans, such as more involvement in NATO military missions, but their voice will be limited.

On defense, the new government would plan to boost spending to 1.4 percent of GDP from 1.05 percent last year, still far below the NATO guideline of 2 percent.

It would also look to stabilize debt, which has dropped thanks to strong economic growth in the past three years to 34.6 percent of GDP in 2017.

Taxes should dip with a reduction in personal income tax and in value-added tax on some services, tap water and draft beer. The budget should remain broadly balanced.

ANO’s current one-party cabinet lost a vote of confidence in January and has since served in a caretaker capacity.
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Europe’s heavyweight economies took steps Friday to safeguard their interests in Iran, seeking to keep the nuclear deal with Tehran alive after Washington pulled out and said sanctions would follow.

Germany and France have significant trade links with Iran and remain committed to the nuclear agreement, as does Britain, and the three countries’ foreign ministers plan to meet Tuesday to discuss it.

That is part of a flurry of diplomatic activity following Tuesday’s unilateral withdrawal from what U.S. President Donald Trump called “a horrible, one-sided deal,” a move accompanied by the threat of penalties against any foreign firms doing business in Iran.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said ways to save the deal without Washington needed to be discussed with Tehran, while France’s Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said EU states would propose sanctions-blocking measures to the European Commission.

“Do we accept extraterritorial sanctions? The answer is no,” Le Maire told reporters.

“Do we accept that the United States is the economic gendarme of the planet? The answer is no.

“Do we accept the vassalization of Europe in commercial matters? The answer is no.”

In Berlin, Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said Germany was ready to give help to its affected firms, including legal advice, to continue doing business in Iran.

Le Maire said he was seeking concrete exemptions for countries already present in Iran, including Renault, Total, Sanofi, Danone and Peugeot.

The 2015 agreement between major powers and Iran set limits on its nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Europeans fear a collapse of the deal could intensify conflicts in the Middle East.

Germany, France and Britain want talks to be held in a broader format to include Iran’s ballistic missile program and its regional military activities, including in Syria and Yemen.

“The extent to which we can keep this deal alive … is something we need to discuss with Iran,” said Merkel, who earlier spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the issue.

Divisions in Iran over how it should respond to the U.S. pullout were illustrated as senior cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami told worshippers at Tehran University on Friday that European nations could not be trusted.

President Hassan Rouhani had said Tuesday that Tehran would remain in the deal, provided its benefits stayed in force with its remaining signatories.

Iran’s foreign minister will travel to Moscow on May 14 and meet his Russian counterpart, Russia’s RIA news agency said, citing a Russian foreign ministry official.

‘Damage limitation’

Iran said it had asked Europe’s Airbus to announce whether it would go ahead with a plane deal with Tehran following the U.S. pullout.

That appears unlikely after U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Tuesday that licenses for the planemaker and rival Boeing Co to sell passenger jets to Iran would be revoked.

Le Maire said Paris would seek to strengthen Europe’s ability to block sanctions and provide investment finance to companies. He called for the creation of a body to monitor the implementation of EU sanctions rules.

Some fear Europe’s room for maneuver is limited. “The Europeans are in the weaker position because they are not united,” said Peter Beyer, Germany’s commissioner for transatlantic relations. Trump’s strength was that he did not need unity, Beyer added.

French exports to Iran doubled to 1.5 billion euros ($1.79 billion) last year, driven by sales of aircraft and automobile parts, according to customs data.

Exports of German goods to Iran rose by around 400 million euros to 3 billion euros. Around 120 German firms have operations with their own staff in Iran, including Siemens, and some 10,000 German companies trade with Iran.

“We are ready to talk to all the companies concerned about what we can do to minimize the negative consequences,” Altmaier told Deutschlandfunk radio. “That means, it is concretely about damage limitation.”

The U.S. ambassador in Berlin, Richard Grenell, said firms should question the morality of doing business with Iran.

“Germany, France and Britain, the ‘EU3,’ say themselves that Iran poses a threat. Do they want to do business with a threat?” Bild newspaper quoted him as saying.

Altmaier said Germany wanted to avoid “a spiral of escalation” in transatlantic trade relations.

Merkel said at a church event in the western German city of Muenster: “It is in our interest to have a strong transatlantic relationship.”

But she also said: “If everybody does what they like, then this is bad news for the world.”
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The chief of inspections at the U.N. nuclear watchdog has resigned suddenly, the agency said on Friday without giving a reason.

The departure of Tero Varjoranta comes at a sensitive time, three days after the United States announced it was quitting world powers’ nuclear accord with Iran, raising questions as to whether Tehran will continue to comply with it.

Varjoranta, a Finn, had been a deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and head of its Department of Safeguards, which verifies countries’ compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, since October 2013.

He will be replaced in an acting capacity by the head of the department’s Iran team, the Vienna-based IAEA said.

“Mr Tero Varjoranta has resigned effective 11 May 2018,” an IAEA spokesman said. “The director general has appointed Mr Massimo Aparo, acting director, Office for Verification in Iran, as acting deputy director general and head of the Department of Safeguards, effective immediately.”

The accord signed by Iran and major powers in 2015 imposed strict limits on Iran’s atomic activities to help ensure they are not put to developing nuclear bombs in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions against Tehran.

The IAEA is policing those restrictions and said on Wednesday, the day after Trump’s announcement, that Iran was still implementing its commitments under the deal.

The U.N. watchdog has also repeatedly defended the landmark agreement, saying it is a gain for nuclear verification. “The agency’s safeguards activities will continue to be carried out in a highly professional manner,” the spokesman said.

Asked why Varjoranta had resigned, he said: “The agency cannot comment on personnel matters, which are confidential.”

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano plans to appoint a permanent replacement as soon as possible, he added.
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British citizens were among a group of people taken hostage on Friday in the Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a spokesman for the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation (ICCN) said.

“For the moment the (ICCN) cannot communicate much about the incident because the hostages are still in captivity. That would put their lives in danger,” Joel Wenga, the ICCN’s head of communications in North Kivu province told Reuters.
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Former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont on Thursday proposed member of parliament Quim Torra as candidate for head of the Catalan government as the region attempts to put an end to a seven-month impasse and form an administration.

Catalan lawmakers must pick a leader to form a government by May 22 to avert more elections, following a standoff during which separatist politicians put forward candidates who were blocked by the courts for being either abroad or in jail.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy called regional elections in December after sacking the previous administration for illegally declaring independence from Spain. However, pro-independence parties again won a majority of seats.

Torra is a lawyer and journalist who has been active in pro-independence lobbies in the wealthy region. He has published several books about the history of Catalonia, according to the Catalan parliament website.

Puigdemont, who fled to Belgium after being sacked as regional leader, is currently in Berlin waiting for German courts to rule on a Spanish request to extradite him on a charge of misuse of public funds.

Puigdemont proposed Torra as candidate in an address released on his YouTube video channel. Torra will need to be confirmed in a vote of confidence in the Catalan parliament.

“Our group proposes member of parliament Quim Torra to be president of the Catalan government so he can take on this responsibility in the next few days and so that a government can be formed immediately,” Puigdemont said.

Spain’s Constitutional Court on Wednesday accepted an appeal from the government that effectively blocked pro-independence politicians in Catalonia from voting in Puigdemont while he remains absent.
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A 104-year-old Australian scientist who had campaigned for the legalization of assisted dying in his home country has ended his life at a clinic in Switzerland.

David Goodall died Thursday at the Lifecircle clinic in Basel after administering a lethal drug under the guidance of doctors.

With his grandson Daniel and a longtime nurse at his side, the renowned botanist and ecologist from Perth, Australia, began the final stage of the process by receiving a fatal dose of barbiturates.

The lethal cocktail is normally ingested, but since Goodall couldn’t swallow, the substance was injected intravenously.

He died shortly after 12:30 p.m. local time while listening to Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s 9th symphony, according to the clinic.

Philip Nitschke, director of Exit International, said Goodall’s last words before losing consciousness were “this is taking an awfully long time.”

Goodall said his last public farewell Wednesday at a news conference designed to publicize his decision and to help others who might also seek that path.

“At my age, and even at rather less than my age, one wants to be free to choose the death and when the death is the appropriate time,” he told reporters. “All the publicity that this has been receiving can only, I think, help the cause of euthanasia for the elderly, which I want.”

Assisted suicide is illegal in most countries around the world and was banned in Australia until the state of Victoria became the first to legalize the practice last year.

But that legislation, which takes effect in June 2019, only applies to terminally ill patients of sound mind and a life expectancy of less than six months, which would have excluded Goodall.

Goodall did not have a terminal illness but said his quality of life had deteriorated significantly in recent years.

“My abilities have been in decline over the past year or two, my eyesight over the past six years. I no longer want to continue life. I’m happy to have the chance tomorrow to end it,” said the centenarian Wednesday wearing a pullover emblazoned with the words “Aging Disgracefully.”

Goodall told reporters he had no last-minute doubts about his decision. But, he was not without regrets.

“There are many things I would like to do, but it’s too late,” he said. “I’m content to leave them undone.”
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Chilean bishops are arriving in Rome ahead of an expected brow-beating next week from Pope Francis, who says he was misled about a bishop at the center of the Chilean church’s sex abuse scandal.

One top-ranked churchman is apparently not coming: Cardinal Javier Errazuriz, retired archbishop of Santiago, who sits on Francis’ kitchen cabinet. Abuse survivors have laid much of the blame for the scandal on Errazuriz, whom they accuse of discrediting victims and covering up abuse rather than punishing pedophiles.

Errazuriz was quoted by Chile’s La Tercera paper as saying he wasn’t coming for personal reasons. 

The executive committee of the Chilean bishops conference said Thursday that the 30-plus bishops were coming with “humility and hope.” They praised Francis’ recent meetings with victims of the Reverend Fernando Karadima of Chile, saying his example “showed us the path that the Chilean church is called to follow.”

Francis had invited Juan Carlos Cruz, James Hamilton and Jose Andres Murillo to the Vatican so he could personally apologize for having discredited them during his January trip to Chile. Francis had said their accusations against a Karadima protege, Bishop Juan Barros, were “calumny” and demanded they present proof of his wrongdoing.

The men, who had frequented Karadima’s posh Santiago community when they were teens, say that Barros witnessed and ignored their abuse. He has denied their accusations, but twice offered to resign. 

Francis twice rejected his resignation, after apparently being counseled that Barros was innocent. Francis hasn’t said who counseled him, but Errazuriz has admitted he didn’t initially believe accusations against Karadima, and in more recent emails he called Cruz a liar and a “serpent.”

Francis summoned the bishops to the Vatican last month, warning that he wanted to discuss short-, medium- and long-term reforms to the church. In the letter, he admitted he had made “grave errors in judgment” about the Barros case, but blamed a “lack of truthful and balanced information” for his missteps.

Francis did his about-face after receiving a 2,300-page report compiled by top Vatican investigators who traveled to Chile and interviewed 64 people — victims, priests and lay Catholics — about the scandal.
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 After failing to coax Washington to stick with the Iran nuclear deal, and facing protests at home over his labor and pension reforms, French President Emmanuel Macron may find solace Thursday in Germany, where he will be given a prestigious European award for another key ambition: far-reaching goals to reform and revamp the European Union. 

The Charlemagne Prize, which he will receive in the German spa town of Aachen, remains more of an aspirational nod to Macron’s European ambitions than his ability to actually unify the region. Named after the medieval emperor who ruled over a swath of western and central Europe, the prize is awarded to those contributing to European unity. 

Angela Merkel won the prize a decade ago for her work in unifying the bloc. Ironically, the German chancellor is now counted as one of the roadblocks in Macron’s call for a post-Brexit European Union to forge closer economic, political and defense bonds.

“It’s easier for him to reform France because he’s in charge,” said Charles Grant, director of the London-based Center for European Reform think tank, or CER, who believes Macron will ultimately succeed in implementing some but not many of his proposed EU changes. “The problem with Europe is he’s not in charge.” 

In Aachen, Macron is slated to deliver a major speech on the 28-member bloc — that dwindles to 27 with Britain’s slated 2019 departure — described as a continuation but not a replica of one he delivered at the Sorbonne University in Paris last September. There, the French president outlined a raft of priorities, from creating a European rapid response defense force and common asylum policy to deeper eurozone integration. 

One immediate deadline is looming to add substance to the rhetoric. Macron and Merkel are to present a joint plan for reforming the 19-member eurozone by June. But there is another in the not-so-distant future. European parliamentary elections are slated for next year, and some fear euroskeptic parties will score strongly. 

No longer a continent in crisis

Macron’s election a year ago, beating far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, has bucked a populist wave elsewhere in Europe, which saw Hungarian leader Victor Orban re-elected to a third consecutive term in April, and anti-establishment parties in Italy surging in March elections. 

In Germany, France’s co-partner in an EU that emerged from a ’50s-era coal and steel pact, a weakened Merkel and her coalition government are reluctant to push eurozone reforms too far. 

Still, some analysts point to encouraging signs for a more unified Europe. One is public support for the European Union itself, with a 2017 Eurobarometer survey showing three-quarters of Europeans view the bloc positively. 

And despite Britain’s planned 2019 exit, “Europe no longer appears to be a continent in crisis,” wrote researchers Kermal Dervis and Caroline Conroy in a Brookings Institution report last month. Even in debt-strapped Greece, “a majority of respondents now support the EU.” 

At least some of Macron’s proposed reforms will be adopted in the long term, the Brookings report predicted, injecting “new dynamism” into the EU, making European citizens more enthusiastic about the bloc and increasing its ability to assert its economic and social values on a changing world stage. 

More broadly, Macron’s leadership role in the EU is a sharp departure from recent tradition. Under Merkel, Germany has been Europe’s main motor over the past decade, and Washington’s go-to European interlocutor under former President Barack Obama. Today, it is France that is putting its stamp on international affairs in the Middle East and the Sahel, and President Donald Trump’s European calls are more likely placed to Paris, not Berlin.

European resistance

So far, however, the French president has little to show for it. Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran agreement on Tuesday has left Europeans scrambling to salvage it, and Macron has yet to secure permanent European exemptions to U.S. metals tariffs.

Macron is also facing German resistance to many of his European reform proposals. On defense, France and Germany recently agreed to jointly develop new military weapons, including a next-generation fighter plane. But there is less appetite in other areas, notably the French leader’s call for closer eurozone financial integration, complete with a eurozone budget and finance minister. 

If Macron is to push Berlin further, he must first prove himself at home, CER’s Grant believes. France’s own economy is only recently emerging from years of lackluster performance. But in March, the country finally met the EU’s 3 percent public deficit cap — posting a surprising 2.6 debt-to-public-deficit ratio — for the first time in more than a decade. 

“If he does succeed in reforming the French economy — which I think he is doing — it will be much harder for the Germans to say no on eurozone reforms,” Grant said. 

Still Macron faces considerable resistance at home. 

Tens of thousands of French took to the streets last Saturday, marking Macron’s year anniversary in office with massive rallies against his proposals. Striking rail and airline employees are snarling commuting schedules and costing their employers billions of dollars in losses. The president’s popularity has hit record lows. Yet the majority of French also support Macron’s rail reforms — and crucially his young La Republique en Marche party controls the French parliament, assuring his legislation safe passage.

A bigger roadblock to eurozone reforms lies outside France. Italy — Europe’s third-largest economy — faces a political deadlock and a shaky economy, making any substantial deepening of the financial union unlikely in the immediate future, Grant said.

Cautious optimism

More fundamentally, perhaps, the French president’s vision of Europe is at odds with those of populist leaders and parties that are resonating in many parts of the continent. Macron has called for a more flexible bloc, which tacitly allows more pro-European countries to forge ahead and more skeptical ones to lag behind. Other EU member states have not signed on to the idea, but analysts such as Grant believe it will become a reality in fact, if not in rhetoric. 

Others are cautiously optimistic the French leader may prevail in his European ambitions, but only with a massive effort in rallying European public opinion to his side — mirroring, in some ways, his surprising victory in last year’s elections.

“Macron will need a ‘Europe en March’ … a project for the democratic unification of Europe,” international affairs experts Brendan Simms and Daniel Schade wrote in The New Republic. “… The French cannot be armed missionaries — that never worked — but they must be the animating spirit of the union.”
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A Russian company accused by U.S. prosecutors of funding a propaganda operation to tilt the 2016 presidential election in President Donald Trump’s favor and stir disharmony in the United States pleaded not guilty Wednesday in federal court.

Concord Management and Consulting LLC is one of three entities and 13 Russian individuals indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office in February in an alleged criminal and espionage conspiracy to tamper in the U.S. race, boost Trump and disparage his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

The indictment said Concord is controlled by Russian businessman Evgeny Prigozhin, who U.S. officials have said has extensive ties to Russia’s military and political establishment.

The indictment said Concord controlled funding, recommended personnel and oversaw the activities of the propaganda campaign.

Prigozhin, also personally charged by Mueller, has been dubbed “Putin’s cook” by Russian media because his catering business has organized banquets for Russian President Vladimir Putin and other senior political figures. He has been hit with sanctions by the U.S. government.

“We plead not guilty. We exercise the right to a speedy trial,” the company’s U.S.-based defense lawyer Eric Dubelier said during the arraignment before Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey, who scheduled a May 16 status hearing.

Another business entity that prosecutors said was controlled by Prigozhin, Concord Catering, was named in the indictment, along with the Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg-based Russian troll farm.

Dubelier told the court he was not authorized to represent Concord Catering, adding that prosecutors had indicted a “proverbial ham sandwich” because the entity did not exist during the time the alleged misconduct occurred.

Mueller’s indictment said the Russian defendants adopted false online personas to push divisive messages, traveled to the United States to collect intelligence and orchestrated political rallies while posing as Americans. Moscow has denied meddling in the election.

Mueller also is investigating whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia and whether the president has unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe. Trump has denied collusion and obstruction, calling Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt.”

Russia does not have an extradition agreement with the United States, making it difficult to apprehend the Russian defendants.

As expected, no corporate representatives for Concord or any of the other corporate defendants appeared in court.

“Alas, they are not here,” prosecutor Jeannie Rhee said. “The government would be thrilled if they were here.”

Mueller’s office tried unsuccessfully to win a delay in the arraignment, saying it was unsure if Dubelier and another U.S. lawyer hired by Concord Management and Consulting were authorized to represent the company because the Office of the Prosecutor General of Russia declined to accept a court summons.
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Google is suspending all advertising connected to Ireland’s abortion referendum as part of moves to protect “election integrity,” the company announced Wednesday.

The move came a day after Facebook banned foreign-backed ads in the Irish campaign, amid global concerns about online election meddling and the role of internet ads in swaying voters. 

Google said that starting Thursday, it would no longer display ads related to the May 25 vote on whether to repeal Ireland’s constitutional ban on most abortions.

The prohibition on ads connected to the Irish vote applies to both Google and YouTube, which the company owns.

The online search leader, which is based in Mountain View, California, declined to say how much advertising revenue it was giving up because of the decision.

Russian role

The role of online ads in elections is under scrutiny following revelations that Russian groups bought ads on leading services such as Google and Facebook to try to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Many of the ads were designed to sow confusion, anger and discord among Americans through messages on hot-button topics.

Karin von Abrams, a London-based analyst with the research firm eMarketer, said banning ads represented a short-term safeguard from potential backlash and reputational damage.

“They won’t want to forgo election-related revenues in the longer term, but they do need to get their houses in order, rather than risk further troubles at this stage,” von Abrams said in an email Wednesday.

Google’s statement followed Facebook’s decision Tuesday to ban foreign advertisements around the abortion referendum, which has drawn worries about the influence of North American groups.

Both Google and Facebook are working on measures to improve transparency before November’s U.S. midterm elections, including tools to show the home country of advertisers.

Ireland bars political donations from abroad, but the law has not been applied to social media advertising. Anti-abortion groups based in the United States are among the organizations that have bought online ads in Ireland during the referendum campaign.

’11th hour’ effort

Irish lawmaker James Lawless, technology spokesman for the opposition Fianna Fail party, welcomed the moves by Google and Facebook, but said “they are rushed and they are coming at the 11th hour,” with just two weeks until voting day.

“It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s an awful pity we couldn’t have done this six months ago,” said Lawless, who has introduced a bill to Ireland’s parliament that would require all online advertisers to disclose the publishers and sponsors behind ads.

Largely Catholic Ireland has Europe’s strictest restrictions on abortion, which is legal only when a woman’s life is in danger. Several thousand Irish women travel each year to get abortions in neighboring Britain.

Voters are being asked whether they want to retain the constitutional ban or repeal it and make parliament responsible for creating abortion laws.

Lawless said he had concerns about some of the online advertising from both sides in the referendum campaign.

“Some quite disingenuous ads have been going around in recent weeks targeting people who are in the middle that aren’t always from who they seem to be from,” he said.

“What we really need is legislation and we need a proper, robust, thought-out approach” to the problem, he said.
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Following President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the international agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, the other signatories said Wednesday they remain committed to the deal.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told RTL radio the agreement is “not dead.” He said French President Emmanuel Macron and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani were due to speak to each other Wednesday, and that the foreign ministers of France, Britain and Germany would discuss the situation with Iranian officials on Monday.

In addition to those diplomatic moves, the foreign ministers of Russia and Germany are holding their own talks Thursday in Moscow with Iran on their agenda.

China’s Foreign Ministry pledged to safeguard the 2015 deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and said that it regrets Trump’s decision to walk away from the pact.

A joint statement from the European Union said the JCPOA has so far been working to meet its goal of ensuring Iran does not develop nuclear weapons, and that lifting sanctions on Iran has had a positive impact on trade and relations.

That contrasts strongly with Trump’s view of what he said Tuesday is “a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.”

In remarks from the White House Diplomatic Room, the president declared that the United States is immediately reinstating all nuclear-related sanctions it waived as part of the JCPOA.

He said the agreement, reached under former President Barack Obama, “didn’t bring calm, it didn’t bring peace, and it never will.”

Inside Iran’s parliament Wednesday, Trump’s decision was greeted with lawmakers setting fire to a piece of paper with a picture of the American flag as well as another paper representing the nuclear deal.

Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said Iran’s nuclear department should be ready to resume all of its activities.

And President Rouhani said earlier Iran would remain committed to the multinational pact.

Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement came despite pleas from several of America’s closest allies in Europe not to imperil the pact. Trump and hard-liners close to the president, such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton, have been fierce advocates for scrapping it.

A senior State Department official told reporters the Trump administration had made “good progress” and “got close” in efforts to reach a supplemental deal with European partners in recent months, including on the issues of ballistic missiles and regional issues.

But the official said the sticking point that prevented an agreement was the so-called sunset clauses in the nuclear deal that allow certain provisions to expire after a given number of years.

Israel, believed to be the only country in the Middle East with a nuclear arsenal, has also backed Trump’s rhetoric on the JCPOA.

Obama, whose administration led intense negotiations to strike the agreement, called Trump’s action “misguided.”

“I believe that the decision to put the JCPOA at risk without any Iranian violation of the deal is a serious mistake,” he cautioned in a statement.

Immediately after Trump’s remarks, the U.S. Treasury Department announced “wind-down provisions” for existing contracts that European countries have with Tehran to avoid running afoul of U.S. banking regulations.

Under those provisions, after six months sanctions will be back in place related to Iran’s oil, petrochemical and shipping sectors as well as its central bank. Sanctions involving Iran’s purchase of U.S. bank notes, trade in gold or precious medals and providing Iran with aluminum or steel.

A senior White House official told reporters that new sanctions are possible “as new information comes to light.”

Trump’s move allows him to claim he has accomplished one of his major 2016 election campaign promises — removing the United States from the pact he repeatedly deemed “the worst deal ever.”

“People will make this all about Trump, but it is not,” James Carafano, vice president for the Heritage Foundation’s national security and foreign policy institute, told VOA. “The deal was not sustainable over time. No one was happy with it, not even the Iranians, who expected big benefits that never materialized. Trump did the equivalent of a mercy killing.”

Proponents of the JCPOA accuse Trump of misrepresenting the agreement’s clauses, contending it has successfully frozen Iran’s nuclear weapons development. They also said the deal’s demise could prompt a nuclear arms race in the region.

Trump’s announcement was made as he prepares to meet — possibly in about a month — North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, to discuss a possible denuclearization agreement.

 
…

U.S. lawmakers are weighing in on the decades-long dispute between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Greece has objected to its neighbor calling itself Macedonia, arguing the name implies a territorial claim to a region in Northern Greece with the same name. Experts say this is the last obstacle to Macedonia joining NATO And with Russian influence growing in Europe, there’s a new push to include the former Yugoslav republic in the alliance. VOA’s Jane Bojadzievski has more.
…

After years of calling the Iran nuclear deal “insane,” disastrous,” and “the dumbest deal ever,” President Donald Trump on Tuesday pulled the U.S. out of the agreement. Trump’s decision is a major blow to the Iran nuclear accord, reached in 2015 among Iran, the U.S., and five other world powers. The main question now is whether the rest of the deal may fall apart, reports VOA’s Bill Gallo.
…

Bosnia will hold presidential and parliamentary elections on October 7, even though rival ethnic leaders have yet to agree on voting rules for the upper house of the Bosniak-Croat Federation’s parliament.

Nearly 3.4 million voters will choose Croat, Serb and Bosniak members of the tripartite presidency and lawmakers for parliament’s lower house, plus regional leaders and assemblies, the Central Election Commission (CIK) said on Tuesday.

But CIK chief Irena Hadziabdic warned: “We are entering the election period without clear regulations on how to carry out elections and contrary to the international principles.”

Days after the European Union said Bosnia risked sliding into a constitutional crisis, she said Federation institutions could cease to operate unless a  solution to the dispute over voting rules is found.

“Unless we … reach a solution within a legal time-frame, we are facing a major problem,” Hadziabdic told a news conference.

The Balkan country has been governed along ethnic lines since a 1995 peace deal ended a four-year-long war that claimed 100,000 lives. The accords split Bosnia into two autonomous regions, the Serb Republic and the Bosniak-Croat Federation, which are linked via a weak central government.

Christian Croat and Muslim Bosniak political parties are currently deadlocked over amendments to the law on voting for the upper house of parliament of their joint Federation.

Responding to an appeal by Croat nationalists, Bosnia’s Constitutional Court ruled in 2016 that candidates elected to the upper house should come from main parties that draw the support of most of their respective ethnic kin.

Croat parties have since proposed new, ethnically-based electoral districts where people would vote only for their own community’s representatives at all levels of governance including the presidency.

They say they want to prevent Muslim Bosniaks, the majority group in the Federation, from bringing about the election of Croats of a civic, non-nationalist persuasion they see as not serving the best interests of Bosnian Croats.

But Bosniak parties oppose their proposals, fearing they could be a maneuver to forge a separatist Croat entity reminiscent of Bosnia’s devastating 1992-95 war.

Western envoys have been mediating talks between the parties but no breakthrough has been made. The EU last week warned Bosnian leaders not to hold the election results “hostage to party interests.”

Bosnian Serb, Bosnian Croat and Muslim Bosniak leaders have heated up nationalist rhetoric recently, launching election campaigns unusually early and halting reforms needed for Bosnia to progress towards membership of the EU and NATO.
…

Thousands of people have taken to Twitter to say “enough” to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, opposing his bid to run for re-election on June 24.

“Tamam” – which roughly translate as “that’s enough” – became a worldwide trending topic on Twitter on Tuesday hours after Erdogan, who has been in power for the past 15 years, said he would step aside “if my people say ‘that’s enough.’”

More than 480,000 tweets with the word “tamam” were posted by the late afternoon. (Check here for a current count – VOA)

Three of Erdogan’s rivals – Meral Aksener, Muharrem Ince and Temel Karamollaoglu – also joined the fray.

Erdogan called snap presidential and parliamentary elections a year and a half before schedule. The elections will usher in a new executive presidential system that increases the powers of the president.
…

Army wife Angela Ricketts was soaking in a bubble bath in her Colorado home, leafing through a memoir, when a message appeared on her iPhone:

“Dear Angela!” it said. “Bloody Valentine’s Day!”

“We know everything about you, your husband and your children,” the Facebook message continued, claiming that the hackers operating under the flag of Islamic State militants had penetrated her computer and her phone. “We’re much closer than you can even imagine.”

Ricketts was one of five military wives who received death threats from the self-styled CyberCaliphate on the morning of Feb. 10, 2015. The warnings led to days of anguished media coverage of Islamic State militants’ online reach.

Except it wasn’t IS

The Associated Press has found evidence that the women were targeted not by jihadists but by the same Russian hacking group that intervened in the American election and exposed the emails of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta.

The false flag is a case study in the difficulty of assigning blame in a world where hackers routinely borrow one another’s identities to throw investigators off track. The operation also parallels the online disinformation campaign by Russian trolls in the months leading up to the U.S. election in 2016.

Links between CyberCaliphate and the Russian hackers — typically nicknamed Fancy Bear or APT28 — have been documented previously. On both sides of the Atlantic, the consensus is that the two groups are closely related.

But that consensus never filtered through to the women involved, many of whom were convinced they had been targeted by Islamic State sympathizers right up until the AP contacted them.

“Never in a million years did I think that it was the Russians,” said Ricketts, an author and advocate for veterans and military families. She called the revelation “mind blowing.”

“It feels so hilarious and insidious at the same time.”

`Completely new ground’

As Ricketts scrambled out of the tub to show the threat to her husband, nearly identical messages reached Lori Volkman, a deputy prosecutor based in Oregon who had won fame as a blogger after her husband deployed to the Middle East; Ashley Broadway-Mack, based in the Washington, D.C., area and head of an association for gay and lesbian military family members; and Amy Bushatz, an Alaska-based journalist who covers spouse and family issues for Military.com.

Liz Snell, the wife of a U.S. Marine, was at her husband’s retirement ceremony in California when her phone rang. The Twitter account of her charity, Military Spouses of Strength, had been hacked. It was broadcasting public threats not only to herself and the other spouses, but also to their families and then-first lady Michelle Obama.

Snell flew home to Michigan from the ceremony, took her children and checked into a Comfort Inn for two nights.

“Any time somebody threatens your family, Mama Bear comes out,” she said.

The women determined they had all received the same threats. They were also all quoted in a CNN piece about the hacking of a military Twitter feed by CyberCaliphate only a few weeks earlier. In it, they had struck a defiant tone. After they received the threats, they suspected that CyberCaliphate singled them out for retaliation.

The women refused to be intimidated.

“Fear is exactly what — at the time — we perceived ISIS wanted from military families,” said Volkman, using another term for the Islamic State group.

Volkman was quoted in half a dozen media outlets; Bushatz wrote an article describing what happened; Ricketts, interviewed as part of a Fox News segment devoted to the menace of radical Islam, told TV host Greta Van Susteren that the nature of the threat was changing.

“Military families are prepared to deal with violence that’s directed toward our soldiers,” she said. “But having it directed toward us is just complete new ground.”

`We might be surprised’

A few weeks after the spouses were threatened, on April 9, 2015, the signal of French broadcaster TV5 Monde went dead.

The station’s network of routers and switches had been knocked out and its internal messaging system disabled. Pasted across the station’s website and Facebook page was the keffiyeh-clad logo of CyberCaliphate.

The cyberattack shocked France, coming on the heels of jihadist massacres at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket that left 17 dead. French leaders decried what they saw as another blow to the country’s media. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said evidence suggested the broadcaster was the victim of an act of terror.

But Guillaume Poupard, the chief of France’s cybersecurity agency, pointedly declined to endorse the minister’s comments when quizzed about them the day after the hack.

“We should be very prudent about the origin of the attack,” he told French radio. “We might be surprised.”

Government experts poring over the station’s stricken servers eventually vindicated Poupard’s caution, finding evidence they said pointed not to the Middle East but to Moscow.

Speaking to the AP last year, Poupard said the attack “resembles a lot what we call collectively APT28.”

Russian officials in Washington and in Moscow did not respond to questions seeking comment. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied masterminding hacks against Western targets.

‘The media played right into it’

Proof that the military wives were targeted by Russian hackers is laid out in a digital hit list provided to the AP by the cybersecurity company Secureworks last year. The AP has previously used the list of 4,700 Gmail addresses to outline the group’s espionage campaign against journalists, defense contractors and U.S. officials. More recent AP research has found that Fancy Bear, which Secureworks dubs “Iron Twilight,” was actively trying to break into the military wives’ mailboxes around the time that CyberCaliphate struck.

Lee Foster, a manager with cybersecurity company FireEye, said the repeated overlap between Russian hackers and CyberCaliphate made it all but certain that the groups were linked.

“Just think of your basic probabilities,” he said.

CyberCaliphate faded from view after the TV5 Monde hack, but the over-the-top threats issued by the gang of make-believe militants found an echo in the anti-Muslim sentiment whipped up by the St. Petersburg troll farm — an organization whose operations were laid bare by a U.S. special prosecutor’s indictment earlier this year.

The trolls — Russian employees paid to seed American social media with disinformation — often hyped the threat of Islamic State militants to the United States. A few months before CyberCaliphate first won attention by hijacking various media organizations’ Twitter accounts, for example, the trolls were spreading false rumors about an Islamic State attack in Louisiana and a counterfeit video appearing to show an American soldier firing into a Quran .

The AP has found no link between CyberCaliphate and the St. Petersburg trolls, but their aims appeared to be the same: keep tension at a boil and radical Islam in the headlines.

By that measure, CyberCaliphate’s targeting of media outlets like TV5 Monde and the military spouses succeeded handily.

Ricketts, the author, said that by planting threats with some of the most vocal members of the military community, CyberCaliphate guaranteed maximum press coverage.

“Not only did we play right into their hands by freaking out, but the media played right into it,” she said. “We reacted in a way that was probably exactly what they were hoping for.”
…

Hundreds of rebels left the last major besieged opposition enclave in Syria on Monday, with thousands more expected to follow, responding to months of pressure by a Russian-backed government offensive, the army, rebels and residents said.

A first convoy of buses with hundreds of rebels and their families, accompanied by Russian military police, departed from the city of Rastan, starting a weeklong evacuation from towns and villages in an enclave between the cities of Homs and Hama.

Rebels representing several major Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions capitulated to a Russian-imposed deal after marathon talks with Russian generals May 2 in Dar al Kabira town in the northern Homs countryside.

The deal forced them to hand in heavy weapons and gave those rebels not ready to make peace with the army the option of leaving with light arms to rebel-held areas in northern Syria.

Draft dodgers would have a six-month reprieve.

Russia exerted pressure by pounding the main towns of the enclave, where over 300,000 inhabitants live, in an escalation that killed and wounded dozens, rebels and residents said.

The Russians closed a border crossing near a key road to prevent civilians fleeing, to raise pressure on mainstream rebels to accept the terms, rebels and residents said.

Fears that Russia and its Syrian ally would unleash an even tougher push, on the scale that ended rebel control of Aleppo in 2016 and eastern Ghouta last month, prompted the capitulation to spare civilian lives, residents and civilian negotiators said.

“They left rebels with no option after bombing civilians and giving them no choice either to submit or obliterate their areas and make civilians pay the price,” Abul Aziz al Barazi, one of the civilian opposition negotiators, told Reuters.

Bombing

The war has been going President Bashar al-Assad’s way since Russia intervened on his side in 2015. From holding less than a fifth of Syria in 2015, Assad has recovered to control the largest chunk of the country with Russian and Iranian help.

A major bombing campaign that began last February ended the last remaining pockets of opposition resistance in the eastern Ghouta, the biggest enclave around the capital, that had for years withstood a siege and successive army onslaughts.

The fall of the once-heavily defended Ghouta demoralized rebels in other areas further east of the capital closer to the Iraqi border and in a southern Damascus pocket.

Now the only besieged area left is a small enclave in southern Damascus, where a few hundred Islamic State militants are making a last stand as aerial strikes devastate the once-teeming major Palestinian camp of Yarmouk, Syria’s largest, and nearby Hajar al Aswad town.

The last batch of rebels in the remaining south Damascus pockets, which includes the towns of Babila, Yalda and Beit Sahem, are expected to leave this week.

Fear of revenge

The Homs and Hama rebel enclave deal leaves the mainly Sunni civilians unprotected, leaving many residents there afraid of revenge by militias from surrounding Alawite villages.

Accordingly, rebels in the enclave say that under the agreement they have gained assurances that the Russian military police would spread out and man checkpoints around the enclave for a renewable six-month period. The rebels see the move as a guarantee against the entry of paramilitary pro-Assad militias.

While Syria’s conflict is in part a proxy struggle among great powers, it also has a sectarian element pitting the mainly Sunni-led rebels against the minority Alawite community to which Assad’s family belongs.

In the latest deal and in other areas, many have opted to stay and make peace with the army rather than leave their homes for an uncertain future in refugee camps in northern Syria.

The opposition accuse the authorities of pushing demographic changes that uproot Sunnis. The authorities deny this and say many civilians were held hostage by forces they call terrorists.
…

The court examining war crimes against ethnic Serbs in Kosovo said on Monday it has appointed a new chief prosecutor, who will pick up the court’s efforts to issue its first indictments, three years after it was established.

The court said U.S. prosecutor Jack Smith will succeed fellow American David Schwendiman, who stepped down March 31, a setback for the court, which politicians in Kosovo have long tried to abolish.

The Specialist Chamber was set up in The Hague in 2015 to handle cases of alleged crimes by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas during the 1998-99 war that led to the country’s secession from Serbia.

The court has yet to hear any cases. Its prosecutors and judges are foreign, but it was established under Kosovan law and comes under Pristina’s jurisdiction. Kosovo lawmakers only this year gave up an attempt to repeal the law that created it.

Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, nearly a decade after a NATO bombing campaign drove out Serbian troops.

NATO launched the action in response to attacks by Serbian forces against Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority during a two-year counter-insurgency war against the KLA.

Crimes committed by Serbian forces were punished by a Yugoslavia tribunal that closed in December last year, but incidents carried out by the KLA were mostly not covered.
…

The ruling Czech ANO party expects a deal on a coalition with the Social Democrats (CSSD) by Friday, ANO chairman and Prime Minister Andrej Babis said on Monday.

The ANO won elections last October but fell short of a parliamentary majority and since then most parties have refused to cooperate with it because Babis faces fraud charges. An ANO minority cabinet lost a vote of confidence in January and has since ruled as a caretaker.

“[The agenda] is in the final stages, I believe it will be absolutely clear by Friday and then we will only wait for the (CSSD) referendum,” Babis told reporters after the meeting.

He referred to an internal vote among CSSD members, which the party leadership may launch as soon as Friday. The result is expected in early June. Babis said he planned to have a confidence vote in the parliament by the end of June.

Neither Babis, nor Social Democratic chairman Jan Hamacek would comment on specific items on the new government’s agenda such as a special tax on banks the Social Democrats want or steeper progression of income tax for the highest earners.

Notes from previous meetings of the ANO and CSSD seen by Reuters showed that the ANO would reject both ideas. CSSD chairman Hamacek said that the agreement should be acceptable to his party colleagues.

“Speaking for myself, the text which we have, is acceptable … all problems are solved. I regard the coalition agreement as solved,” he said.

The parties also agreed that if all CSSD ministers resigned, the whole government would follow suit, Hamacek said.

The leaders declined to comment on the other key CSSD demand: that Babis resign if found guilty in an investigation into charges of illegally tapping EU subsidies. He denies the police charges and the case is yet to go to trial.

If the agreement holds, the two parties would still need a support from a third party, the Communists, to win a confidence vote. It would be the first participation of the Communists on power, however indirect, since their  totalitarian rule fell during the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

Their limited role, with no cabinet seats, would not bring the kind of policy changes that have sparked conflict between the EU and Hungary and Poland. But it would still anger many Czechs who suffered under their rule.

ANO has also cooperated with the far-right, anti-EU and anti-NATO SPD party in parliament, even considering leaning on it for support for a minority government. That helped the SPD to fill the post of the deputy speaker and chair some committees.

The Social Democrats have demanded SPD officials be ousted from these positions to prevent the ANO seeking support from the anti-Islam party in case of coalition squabbles. Both Babis and Hamacek declined to comment.
…

Britain’s Foreign Secretary is set to lobby the Trump administration to remain a party to the 2015 agreement struck between Iran and world powers to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

Boris Johnson is meeting Monday with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and National Security Adviser John Bolton with Iran as one of the top agenda items, according to Johnson’s office.

“The UK, U.S., and European partners are also united in our effort to tackle the kind of Iranian behavior that makes the Middle East region less secure – its cyber activities, its support for groups like Hezbollah, and its dangerous missile program, which is arming Houthi militias in Yemen,” Johnson said ahead of his visit.

U.S. President Donald Trump has been a frequent critic of what he calls a flawed deal, and has until May 12 to decide whether to renew sanctions waivers linked to the agreement. Trump wants added limitations on Iran’s ballistic missile program and objects to the so-called sunset clauses in the nuclear deal that let certain provisions expire after a certain amount of time.

Britain, China, France, Russia, Germany and the United States negotiated the agreement with Iran amid allegations Iran was working to develop nuclear weapons. Iran repeatedly denied that was the case, and has further asserted that it has every right to its ballistic missile program for defense.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Sunday that if the United States does withdraw from the nuclear deal, “you will soon see that they will regret it like never before in history.”

Britain’s Ambassador to the U.S. Kim Darroch said in an interview Sunday with CBS that Johnson and Trump spoke about the nuclear deal in a phone call Saturday and that the president had likely not yet made a final decision.

“It’s not a perfect deal, no deal is ever perfect, and the president is rightly concerned about Iran’s regional activities, which are malign and damaging to security and stability,” Darroch said.

He added that Britain prefers the United States remain part of the agreement, but that as long as Iran remains in compliance, Britain “wants to stick with it.”
…

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed Sunday to launch a new offensive against Kurdish militants along the country’s borders with Syria and Iraq.

Turkey has conducted two previous operations aimed at Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, militants Ankara considers an extension of Kurdish fighters the Turkish government has been clashing with for three decades for control of southeastern Turkey.

In an address to thousands of supporters in Istanbul in advance of June’s snap election, Erdogan said, “We will not give up on constricting terrorist organizations. In the new period, Turkey will add new ones to the Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch operations in order to clear its borders.”

He added, “We shattered the terror corridor being formed on our southern border with these operations. Our soldiers, who lastly wrote an epic in Afrin, are ready for new missions. The operations will continue until not one terrorist is left.”

Erdogan called for the June 24 election more than a year ahead of the planned vote, which analysts say was designed to capitalize on nationalist sentiment running in favor of the successful military operation in the Syrian border town of Afrin.

With the election, Turkey is transforming its governing system to an executive presidency, abolishing the position of prime minister and vesting the ruling power in the presidency.

Erdogan said that with the presidential and parliamentary votes, Turkey would “take the stage as a global power.”

 
…

High school students in Germany have gathered tens of thousands of signatures in an online petition to complain about an “unfair” final English exam, saying the test was much harder than in previous years.

By Sunday, the students from the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg had gathered almost 36,000 signatures — even though only 33,500 people took last month’s statewide exam.

They complained that text excerpts from American author Henry Roth’s 1934 novel “Call it Sleep” were too difficult and obscure to analyze and asked for the grading to be more lenient this year.

The final high school exams in Germany — called the Abitur — are a rite of passage that all students who want to enter university have to pass.

Only those with excellent grades and test scores will get into the most coveted university programs, with medicine among the hardest. But other subjects like engineering or language studies also offer only a limited amount of places.

Many German students, parents and teachers have been stressed out for months over the Abitur. Often schools will cancel all regular classes for younger students during the tests so the Abitur students won’t be disturbed.

The online petition has created such uproar that even state governor Winfried Kretschmann weighed in, though he showed only limited compassion.

“There’s no right to a simple Abitur,” he told the frustrated teenagers. “You wish for it, but you don’t have a right to it.”

At the same time Kretschmann admitted that his own English skills were too weak to actually judge whether the disputed text had been overly difficult, the German news agency dpa reported.

Students said the passage from Roth’s novel that they had to analyze — a metaphorical description of the Statue of Liberty — was difficult to understand because of its “unknown vocabulary.” They also complained the questions they had to answer were not asked precisely.

They quoted some of the text’s most difficult sentences to illustrate their point: “Against the luminous sky the rays of her halo were spikes of darkness roweling the air; shadow flattened the torch she bore to a black cross against flawless light — he blackened hilt of a broken sword. Liberty.”

The state’s education ministry responded by asking external experts to evaluate the exam — who then concluded its level was appropriate. Educational authorities also noted that students in the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania had to analyze the same passage and did not complain about it.

That has not stopped the number of signatures online from growing, as younger and out-of state students sign the petition in a show of solidarity.

“I was struggling like all the others, even though I spent a year abroad in America!” Aimee Schaefer wrote in the comment section of the petition. “You would think that I can understand everything by now, but I had to look up a lot of vocabulary… whoever compiled this exam must really hate us Abitur students.”

 
…

Polish rescue workers on Sunday found the body of 38-year-old coal miner, the first fatality after an earthquake hit a coal mine in southern Poland.

Three other miners have been missing some 900 meters (2,950 feet) below ground since Saturday morning at the mine in the town of Jastrzebie-Zdroj, close to Poland’s border with the Czech Republic. One of them has been located but was not rescued yet, a mining official said Sunday.

The head of the Jastrzebie Coal Company, Daniel Ozon, said the latest miner pulled out of the Zofiowka mine was pronounced dead after he had been trapped under some metal. He had worked for the company for 10 years.

More than 200 workers were involved in the rescue operation. Ozon said emergency workers were pumping air into the affected area to lower the level of methane gas before they can safely move ahead.

After the quake hit, four miners were rescued quickly but seven others went missing. Two of the missing were later found alive and have been hospitalized.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who came to Jastrzebie Zdroj on Saturday night, visited the hospitalized miners and met with their families. President Andrzej Duda was on his way to the town.

Authorities have launched an investigation into the accident.

Poland’s State Mining Authority said the temblor had a magnitude of 3.4, while the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre pegged it at 4.3. TVN24 said the quake was also felt on the surface and shook some houses.

Coal mining is a major industry in Poland. Coal remains the main source of energy and heating in the country but Poland is taking some steps to shift toward renewable, cleaner sources of energy. The Main Statistical Office said some 65.8 million metric tons (58.7 million tonnes) of coal were extracted last year in Poland, some 4.8 million tons less than in 2016.

Still many of Poland’s mines are dangerous, with methane gas that has led to a number of deadly explosions and cave-ins. So far this year, five miners including Sunday’s casualty have been killed at different mines, according to the State Mining Authority.

In 2016, eight miners were killed in a cave-in at the Rudna mine in Polkowice and methane explosions killed five miners at the Myslowice-Wesola mine in 2014.

 
…

Nearly a year ago, an investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller was tasked by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein with exploring any links or coordination between the Russian government and “individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” and, additionally, “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation,” according to the appointment order.

Since the order was issued on May 17, 2017, the investigation has grown into a multipronged effort that has resulted in criminal proceedings against 19 people — five U.S. nationals, 13 Russians and one Dutch national — and three Russian organizations.

Here are four areas of the investigation:

​Trump campaign officials’ business deals involving Russia

Perhaps the most visible results of the investigation so far are the indictments of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business partner, Paul Gates.

On Oct. 30, 2017, Manafort and Gates surrendered to FBI agents to face charges they conspired to launder money, failed to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts, acted as unregistered agents of foreign principal, and made false statements, including statements under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. The charges were related to consulting work they did for pro-Russian businesspeople in Ukraine. Gates has pleaded guilty, while Manafort maintains his innocence.

CNN has reported that the FBI is looking for suspicious ties between Trump and Russia in financial records related to the Trump Organization (the collective name of a group of some 500 business entities owned solely or principally by President Trump), Trump himself, his family members, and his campaign associates.

Transactions under investigation include Russian purchases of Trump apartments, a New York City development with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $30 million more than its appraised value.

​Russian campaign contacts

In addition, the probe is looking at contacts between Russian government officials and Trump campaign officials.

George Papadopoulos, a former Trump foreign policy adviser, pleaded guilty Oct. 5, 2017, to making false statements to FBI agents about contacts he had with agents of the Russian government while working for the Trump campaign in 2016. He is cooperating with Mueller’s investigators.

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty Dec. 1, 2017, to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about contacts and communications with Russia’s then-ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Kislyak returned to Russia in August 2017 and now serves in the Russian legislature.

On Feb. 16, 2018, Mueller issued indictments for 13 Russian citizens and three Russian entities regarding campaign contacts, plus released new charges against Manafort and Gates on February 22.

Russian attempts to influence US voters through cyberspace

In January 2017, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded “with high confidence” that the Russian government interfered with the U.S. election by hacking into the computers of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, campaign chairman for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The hackers then forwarded the contents of the emails to WikiLeaks.

NBC has reported Mueller is assembling a case against Russians who carried out the hacking and leaking of private information “designed to hurt Democrats in the 2016 election.” NBC said potential charges include violations of statutes on conspiracy, election law, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Beyond the targeted hacking, Mueller’s team is investigating at least one Russia-based “troll farm” — a group or organization intentionally posting inflammatory comments on social media to disrupt an online community — known as the Internet Research Agency.

In February, a federal grand jury issued indictments for 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities, alleging they pretended to be Americans online, creating posts that were meant to “sow discord” within the American political system and “spread distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general.” The eight-count indictment charges that by early to mid-2016, the defendants were using their online identities to support Trump’s candidacy and disparage his challenger, Clinton.

The indictment also alleges the defendants encouraged minorities not to vote, or to vote for a third-party candidate.

On Dec. 14, 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported Mueller had requested that data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica turn over the emails of any of its employees who worked on the Trump campaign.

In 2018, Cambridge Analytica was found to have inappropriately acquired the personal information of more than 50 million Facebook users while working on Trump’s presidential campaign. Having also done work for a pro-Brexit campaign in Britain, the company is now the subject of investigations in both countries.

Cambridge Analytica announced Wednesday it was filing for bankruptcy and shutting down.

​Obstruction of justice

A fourth prong of the special counsel investigation is whether the Trump administration obstructed justice with requests to federal law enforcement agencies to state that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Part of that investigation centers on whether the firing of FBI Director James Comey in May 2017 amounted to obstruction of justice, after, according to Comey, Trump tried and failed to get Comey to swear to the president a vow of loyalty and to end an investigation of former National Security Adviser Flynn, who was fired in February 2017.

The Mueller team has Comey’s personal notes on his interactions with the president while head of the FBI, but a federal judge has denied multiple Freedom of Information Act requests to make the notes public.

Meanwhile, Comey has released his own version of what took place between him and the president in a memoir released last month titled, A Higher Loyalty. The volume of preorders drove the book to No. 1 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list, four weeks before its April 17 release.
…

Iran’s president said Sunday if the U.S. withdraws from the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers that Washington would regret the decision.

Hassan Rouhani said in a televised address, “If the United States leaves the nuclear agreement, you will soon see that they will regret it like never before in history.

“We have plans to resist any decision by Trump on the nuclear accord,” Rouhani said in a speech carried live by state television, Reuters reported.

“Orders have been issued to our atomic energy organization … and to the economic sector to confront America’s plots against our country,” Rouhani told a rally in northeast Iran.

U.S. President Donald Trump has said he will decide by May 12 whether Washington will remain an adherent to the nuclear agreement.

He has said he will pull out of the pact if amendments are not made, including a proposal to limit Iran’s ballistic missile program, which Iran has maintained is a defensive deterrent.

Iran’s foreign minister said Thursday Iran will not renegotiate a 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers.

“We will neither outsource our security nor will we renegotiate or add onto a deal we have already implemented in good faith,’’ Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on YouTube.

Meanwhile, a foreign policy adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned last week Iran would withdraw from the deal if Trump follows through on his threat to pull out of the accord.

Ali Akbar Velayati said on Iran’s state television website, “If the United States withdraws from the nuclear deal, then we will not stay in it.”

Velayati warned against any attempts to renegotiate in exchange for sanctions relief, saying, “Iran accepts the nuclear agreement as it has been prepared and will not accept adding or removing anything.”

The three European countries that signed the agreement, Britain, France and Germany, have repeatedly tried to persuade Trump not to withdraw.

China and Russia also signed the deal. All of the signatory countries are members of the United Nations Security Council.
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Russian’s most widely known opposition leader Alexei Navalny, along with hundreds of his supporters, were detained Saturday as street demonstrations unfolded in Moscow and 90 other Russian cities to protest Vladimir Putin’s inauguration for a fourth presidential term.

Within minutes of Navalny arriving at the protest in central Moscow, he was arrested along with his ally Nikolai Lyaskin. The independent monitoring group OVD-Info estimated more than 350 people had been detained nationwide by police, who dubbed the protests “unsanctioned.”
 

In the hours before his appearance, Navalny — barred from running in April’s presidential race — stayed at a secret location to avoid being detained before he managed to reach the protest held in Pushkinskaya Square. He was dragged off by his arms and legs to a van by five policemen as protesters chanted, “Russia without Putin” and “Down with the Tsar.”

A nationalist youth movement organized a counterprotest in Moscow, attempting to block Navalny’s supporters from gaining access to Pushkinskaya Square.

Although observers expect the anti-Putin protests to be on a smaller scale than in 2012, the Kremlin appears to be planning a more low-key inauguration than previous ones and Putin is likely not to venture beyond the Kremlin complex.  

Navalny, who has been repeatedly detained over the years for organizing anti-Kremlin protests, urged supporters all week with online messages to protest Saturday, saying “If you think that he’s not our tsar, take to the streets of your cities. We will force the authorities, made up of swindlers and thieves, to reckon with the millions of citizens who did not vote for Putin.”

One activist told a crowd in the city of Khabarovsk, “Putin has already been on his throne for 18 years! We’ve ended up in a dead end over these 18 years. I don’t want to put up with this!”

In St. Petersburg, anti-Putin protesters were prevented from reaching the city’s central square.
 

In Yekaterinburg in the Urals, 1,500 kilometers from Moscow, local reporters estimated that about 1,000 people turned out to protest. There also were reports of protests in Siberian towns. Monitors reported that police arrested about 150 people in Krasnoyarsk, in eastern Siberia, and another 75 in Yakutsk.

In the March election, Putin, who has been either president or prime minister since 1999, won against seven weak challengers with almost 77 percent of the vote. It was the largest margin by any post-Soviet Russian leader, which the Kremlin argues demonstrates his “father-of-the-nation” status and his clear mandate to govern.

One of Putin’s challengers, however, described the voting as a “filthy election.”

International observers criticized the poll, saying there had been no real choice in the election and complained of widespread allegations of ballot rigging amid reports of hundreds of ballot violations at polling stations across the country. Russian election officials described the violations as “minor,” but said they were investigating.

Despite Putin’s overwhelming election win, Monday’s inauguration ceremony will be a simpler affair than his previous three swearing-ins. The Russian TV station Dozhd reported Saturday that Putin will forgo driving in a presidential motorcade through central Moscow, avoiding the awkward scenes in 2012, when the capital’s streets appeared almost empty.

During Monday’s inauguration, Putin will stay within the Kremlin’s grounds, taking his oath of office in the Andreyevsky Hall. He is due to step outside the hall to thank party volunteers who worked on his election campaign.

In an effort presumably to head off Saturday’s protests, Russian police raided the homes of Navalny’s supporters on Friday and detained dozen.

“Activist Ilya Gantvarg was detained in St. Petersburg last [Friday] night,” said an Open Russian Foundation press release reported by Interfax.
 

The Open Russia document also says one of its own members, Viktor Chirikov, was detained in the city of Krasnodar, and that an employee of Navalny’s staff was detained in her own backyard in Krasnoyarsk.

“She was taken to a court right from home … tentatively [to be charged] in connection with the May 5 action,” the group said.

In a recent interview with VOA’s Russian Service, Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff, had warned that a crackdown was imminent. “The authorities have been and continue to be afraid of protests. They are trying everything they can — threats, warnings, promises to shatter [the opposition] — it’s always the same,” he said.

“Politically speaking, they just can’t afford to have a large-scale protests in Moscow,” he said.

Navalny’s regional headquarters in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg were raided early Friday. Police confiscated promotional materials to be used at Saturday’s rally.

According to a report by Radio Free Europe, a Navalny organizer in the southern city of Volgograd Tweeted that local students were “forced to sign papers acknowledging that they could face serious consequences, including expulsion, if they take part in the rally.”

Navalny, who organized massive street protests to coincide with Putin’s 2012 reelection, was barred from the presidential ballot due to a conviction on financial-crimes charges he contends were fabricated.

VOA Russian Service’s Yulia Savchenko contributed to this article.

 
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Russians angered by the impending inauguration of Vladimir Putin to a new term as president protested Saturday in scores of cities across the country – and police responded by reportedly arresting more than 1,600 of them.

Among those arrested was protest organizer Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner who is Putin’s most prominent foe.

Police seized Navalny by the arms and legs and carried the thrashing activist from Moscow’s Pushkin Square, where thousands were gathered for an unauthorized protest.

Police also used batons against protesters who chanted “Putin is a thief!” and “Russia will be free!”

Demonstrations under the slogan “He is not our czar” took place throughout the country, from Yakutsk in the far northeast to St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad on the fringes of Europe.

The protests demonstrated that Navalny’s opposition, although considered beleaguered by Russian officials and largely ignored by state-controlled television, has sizeable support in much of the country.

“I think that Putin isn’t worthy of leading this country. He has been doing it for 18 years and has done nothing good for it,” said Moscow demonstrator Dmitry Nikitenko. “He should leave for good.”

OVD-Info, an organization that monitors political repression, said late Saturday that at least 1,607 people had been detained at demonstrations in 20 Russian cities. It said 704 were arrested in Moscow alone, and another 229 in St. Petersburg.

Moscow police said about 300 people were detained in the capital, state news agencies said, and there was no official countrywide tally.

“Let my son go!” Iraida Nikolaeva screamed, running after police in Moscow when they detained her son. “He did not do anything! Are you a human or not? Do you live in Russia or not?”

Navalny was to be charged with disobeying police, an offense that carries a sentence of up to 15 days, news reports said, though when he would face a judge was not immediately clear. Navalny has served several multi-week stretches in jail on similar charges.

In St. Petersburg, police blocked off a stretch of Nevsky Prospekt as a crowd of about 1,000 marched along the renowned avenue. Video showed some demonstrators being detained.

Putin is to be inaugurated for a new six-year term on Monday after winning re-election in March with 77 percent of the vote. Navalny had hoped to challenge him on the ballot but was blocked because of a felony conviction in a case that supporters regard as falsified in order to marginalize him.

Navalny has called nationwide demonstrations several times in the past year, and their turnout has rattled the Kremlin.

Saturday’s protests attracted crowds of hundreds in cities that are far remote from Moscow, challenging authorities’ contention that Navalny and other opposition figures appeal only to a small, largely urban elite.
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