Since the International Criminal Court began collecting material three months ago for a possible war crimes case involving Afghanistan, it has gotten a staggering 1.17 million statements from Afghans who say they were victims.

The statements include accounts of alleged atrocities not only by groups like the Taliban and the Islamic State, but also involving Afghan Security Forces and government-affiliated warlords, the U.S.-led coalition, and foreign and domestic spy agencies, said Abdul Wadood Pedram of the Human Rights and Eradication of Violence Organization.

Based in part on the many statements, ICC judges in The Hague would then have to decide whether to seek a war crimes investigation. It’s uncertain when that decision will be made.

​Millions of possible victims

The statements were collected between Nov. 20, 2017, and Jan. 31, 2018, by organizations based in Europe and Afghanistan and sent to the ICC, Pedram said. Because one statement might include multiple victims and one organization might represent thousands of victim statements, the number of Afghans seeking justice from the ICC could be several million.

“It is shocking there are so many,” Pedram said, noting that in some instances, whole villages were represented. “It shows how the justice system in Afghanistan is not bringing justice for the victims and their families.”

The ICC did not give details about the victims or those providing the information.

“I have the names of the organizations, but because of the security issues, we don’t want to name them because they will be targeted,” said Pedram, whose group is based in Kabul.

Many of the representations include statements involving multiple victims, which could be the result of suicide bombings, targeted killings or airstrikes, he said.

​Fear for safety

Among those alleging war crimes is a man who asked The Associated Press to be identified only by his first name, Shoaib, because he fears for his safety.

Shoaib said his father, Naimatullah, was on a bus in Dawalat Yar district in Afghanistan’s central Ghor Province in 2014 when a band of gunmen stopped it and two other buses, forced the passengers off and told them to hand over their identity cards. The 14 Shiites among them were separated from the rest and killed, one by one, he said.

The slayings outraged the country. A Taliban commander was soon arrested and brought before the media, but no news about a trial or punishment was ever reported, said Shoaib, who is in his 20s.

Displaying a photo of the man he believes killed his father, Shoaib said he doesn’t go to the authorities for information about the incident because the commander had connections with the police and the local government administration.

Shoaib is still afraid.

“Please don’t say where I live, or show my face,” he implored a reporter. “What if they find me? There is no protection in Afghanistan,” he said.

“Everybody knows that they have connection in the government,” he added. “I think in Afghanistan, if you have money, then you can give it to anyone, anywhere, to do anything.”

Several powerful warlords, many of whom came to power after the collapse of the Taliban in 2001 following the U.S.-led intervention, are among those alleged to have carried out war crimes, said Pedram, who also is cautious about releasing any names.

After receiving death threats last year, Pedram fled Kabul briefly and now keeps a lower profile, no longer speaking to local media.

“The warlords are all here. You have to be very careful,” he said. “In the morning, I kiss my little son goodbye, I kiss my wife goodbye because I don’t know what will happen to me and when, or if I will see them again.”

​World’s criminal court

Established in 2002, the ICC is the world’s first permanent court set up to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The ICC can only investigate any crimes in Afghanistan after May 2003, when the country ratified the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court.

Former President Bill Clinton signed the treaty, but President George W. Bush renounced the signature, citing fears that Americans would be unfairly prosecuted for political reasons.

In November, when ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda sought judicial authorization to begin the investigation, she said the court had been looking into possible war crimes in Afghanistan since 2006.

Bensouda said in November that “there is a reasonable basis to believe” that crimes against humanity and war crimes were committed by the Taliban as well as the Haqqani network. She also said there was evidence that the Afghan National Security Forces, Afghan National Police and its spy agency, known as the NDS, committed war crimes.

Bensouda also said evidence existed of war crimes committed “by members of the United States armed forces on the territory of Afghanistan, and by members of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in secret detention facilities in Afghanistan,” as well as in countries that had signed on to the Rome Statute. The secret detention facilities were operated mostly between 2003 and 2004, she said.

Breaking through impunity

It was the first time that Bensouda has targeted Americans for alleged war crimes. Bensouda said an investigation under the auspices of the international tribunal could break through what she called “near total impunity” in Afghanistan.

The prosecutor’s formal application to the court set up a possible showdown with Washington. While the U.S. is not a member state of the ICC, its citizens can be charged with crimes committed in countries that are members.

At the time of Bensouda’s announcement, a Pentagon spokesman said the U.S. Defense Department does not accept that such an investigation of U.S. personnel is warranted. The U.S. State Department has said it opposes the court’s involvement in Afghanistan.

​Justice for a loved one

Another Afghan who went to the ICC is Hussain Razaee, whose fiancee, Najiba, was among 30 people killed in July when a Taliban suicide attacker rammed a car bomb into a bus carrying employees from the Ministry of Mines.

For months, Razaee said he contemplated suicide. He had spent two years convincing Najiba’s parents to allow them to marry, and they had finally agreed. Unlike most Afghan couples, theirs was not to be an arranged marriage.

“I lost the person I loved,” he said.

Razaee said he went to the ICC because he wants those responsible to be punished, even if a peace deal with the Taliban is reached.

“I am pursuing this because I want the ICC to record these cases so that if there is a peace agreement, the Taliban leaders will be required to identify the people behind the killings,” Razaee said.

“I don’t trust the international community to bring any of these warlords or Taliban to justice, but if an international legal body rules according to the law, then the government could be forced to enforce it,” he said.
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The White House on Thursday blamed Russia for the devastating “NotPetya” cyber attack last year, joining the British government in condemning

Moscow for unleashing a virus that crippled parts of Ukraine’s infrastructure and damaged computers in countries across the globe.

The attack in June of 2017 “spread worldwide, causing billions of dollars in damage across Europe, Asia and the Americas,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement.

“It was part of the Kremlin’s ongoing effort to destabilize Ukraine and demonstrates ever more clearly Russia’s involvement in the ongoing conflict,” Sanders added. “This was also a reckless and indiscriminate cyber attack that will be met with international consequences.”

The U.S. government is “reviewing a range of options,” a senior White House official said when asked about the consequences for Russia’s actions.

Earlier on Thursday, Russia denied an accusation by the British government that it was behind the attack, saying it was part of a “Russophobic” campaign that it said was being waged by some Western countries.

The so-called NotPetya attack in June started in Ukraine where it crippled government and business computers before spreading around Europe and the world, halting operations atports, factories and offices.

Britain’s foreign ministry said in a statement released earlier in the day that the attack originated from the Russian military.

“The decision to publicly attribute this incident underlines the fact that the UK and its allies will not tolerate malicious cyber activity,” the ministry said in a statement.

“The attack masqueraded as a criminal enterprise but its purpose was principally to disrupt,” it said.

“Primary targets were Ukrainian financial, energy and government sectors. Its indiscriminate design caused it to spread further, affecting other European and Russian business.”
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Russia’s communications providers on Thursday blocked access to the website of opposition leader Alexei Navalny on orders of the state communications watchdog.

Navalny announced the move via his Twitter account, which was still accessible. Users going to the website were told it could not be reached.

The agency, Roskomnadzor, had demanded that Navalny remove a video alleging that Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko received lavish hospitality from billionaire Oleg Deripaska.

Deripaska rejected the report and won a court ruling that ordered Navalny to remove the investigation as an unlawful intrusion into the tycoon’s privacy. Navalny refused, and appealed the ruling.

A statement Thursday from Deripaska’s Basic Element company said: “Mr. Deripaska’s claim is to protect his right to privacy, and has nothing to do with any political struggle between Mr. Navalny and his political opponents.”

Navalny’s investigation drew from the social media account of a woman who claims to have had an affair with Deripaska.

The woman, who calls herself Nastya Rybka, has written a book about her work as an escort and said on Russian television last year she had been hired by a modeling agency to spend time at Deripaska’s yacht.

Instagram on Thursday had removed some of Rybka’s posts following Roskomnadzor’s request, but a YouTube video of Navalny’s investigation that has generated over 5 million views remained available.

Rybka posted several videos in 2016 showing Deripaska on his yacht talking with Prikhodko. In one snippet, Deripaska explains to the woman why relations between Russia and the United States are so bad.

Deripaska has been linked to U.S. President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who has been indicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

Navalny, the most vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, wanted to run against him in Russia’s March 18 presidential election, but was barred because of a fraud conviction in a case that many see as politically motivated.
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A series of muggings, armed robberies and confrontations during Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival celebrations are underscoring the deteriorating security situation in the city. 

TV Globo on Wednesday showed videos of gunfire between rival drug gangs, teenagers punching tourists in areas usually considered relatively safe and a policeman narrowly escaping after several people attacked him in front of his home.

Rio state Gov. Luiz Fernando Pezao acknowledged there weren’t enough police on hand during the first couple days of Carnival, though more than 17,000 policemen worked in Rio state each day during the festivities. 

“We were not prepared. There was a failure on the first two days, and then we brought backup for police. I think there has been a mistake in our part,” Pezao said. 

Statistics from the Friday to Tuesday bash have not yet been released. However, Pezao said the number of firearms confiscated by authorities was “incredible.” 

A year after hosting the 2016 Olympics, Rio is experiencing a spike in violence. Days before Carnival, rival drug gangs closed key arteries of the city. 

Last year Rio used almost 12,000 policemen during Carnival, but it also counted on the help of 9,000 members of the country’s armed forces. This time there was no federal aid during the bash.

Politicians avoided Rio during one of the most political Carnivals in Brazil’s history, with revelers targeting Pezao, President Michel Temer and especially Mayor Marcelo Crivella, an evangelical bishop who is no fan of the party and left the city for Europe.

Beija-Flor de Nilopolis won the samba-school parade title on Wednesday in Rio’s Sambadrome using corruption as a theme. One of its floats portrayed a rat below the building of state-oil Petrobras, which is at the center of a corruption scandal that has engulfed politicians across Latin America. 

Crowd favorite Paraiso do Tuiuti finished in a surprising second place, likely because of its political tone. The samba-school’s anti-slavery theme attacked Temer’s labor reform and the president himself. One of Tuiuti’s floats featured a vampire wearing a presidential sash. 

Next week Temer, whose popularity is at single-digits, wants to push through a reform of Brazil’s pension system. Analysts have said bill is unlikely to pass with October’s presidential election approaching. The Carnival atmosphere did not help the president make his case for austerity.
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Brett McGurk, the U.S. special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter the Islamic State group, talks with VOA about where the fight against Islamic State goes next.
…

Brett McGurk, the U.S. special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter the Islamic State group, has been meeting with partners in Kuwait this week, looking to build on the gains the alliance has made in countering and, in many instances, crushing IS militants in Iraq and Syria. VOA’s U.N. Correspondent Margaret Besheer spoke with McGurk about where the fight against Islamic State goes next.

Besheer: “Special Envoy, welcome. So you just had this meeting here in Kuwait. Is there a long-term political and strategic road map for countering ISIS and making sure it doesn’t regroup and re-emerge in Iraq and Syria?”

McGurk: “Well, in terms of countering ISIS (IS), you have to take into account where we were three years ago. I remember being here in Kuwait three years ago where nobody thought they’d be able to take back territory from ISIS. They were controlling, really, basically a quasi-state with 7 million people. They were planning attacks all around the world. They were committing acts of genocide, and they were approaching the capital of Baghdad. So, since then, almost 100 percent of their territory has been taken back, and most important, they haven’t reclaimed any of these areas. So in Iraq — the focus of the meetings today, really — 100 percent of the territory in Iraq has been reclaimed from ISIS, so that’s quite extraordinary.

But you ask about whether this will be sustainable. I think I’ll make three points. Number one, they haven’t retaken any territory. Number two, in areas that they have lost, 3.2 million Iraqis — these are almost all Sunni Arabs who fled ISIS — are back in their homes. That’s an unprecedented rate of returns in a post-conflict environment like this.

WATCH: US Envoy Discusses Next Moves in Battle Against IS

And now, today, the third point I make is you see really the entire world coming to help Iraq get back on its feet. And the underpinning of this is an initiative of the Iraqi government with the World Bank. So they have put out to the world, just Monday here in Kuwait, their 10-year vision. It’s a 10-year plan of reconstruction, investment, and the foundational kind of landmark event here to get this started is today. This is just a — this is not the end of the road. It’s really the beginning of the road of a 10-year process of recovery, but I think it’s an encouraging start.

Besheer: But at the same time, [U.S.] Secretary [of State Rex] Tillerson announced, I think, it was $200 million for newly liberated areas in Syria, but none for the newly liberated areas in Iraq. So how does that play into that strategy?

​McGurk: Well, we’re the number one contributor to humanitarian aid in Iraq. We’re the number one contributor in stabilization assistance in Iraq. We’re the number one contributor in military support in Iraq. A lot of our support is still in the pipeline, so of course we have a budgetary cycle of the way these things go, but we also announced yesterday — Secretary Tillerson announced an important signing of the Iraqi Minister of Finance with the EXIM Bank [the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the government’s official export credit agency] ​— about $3.3 billion to support financing for U.S. companies to do business in Iraq. And U.S. companies in Iraq are doing quite well. I mean, General Electric helps provide for almost 60 percent of all of electricity generation in Iraq. So, look, this is going to be a long-term effort.

The one point I want to make out of the conference here, because I’ve read some stories about, well, this is just a one-day event and they have to try to raise $10 billion — that’s not the case. Iraq put out a figure on Monday here that they need about $80 billion over the next 10 years to help finance their reconstruction. They also made very clear that most of their reconstruction assistance will come from their own budget, their own reform process — working with the IMF [International Monetary Fund], working with the World Bank, to reform their own mechanisms. So, they’re really not asking for handouts. They’re asking for a hand up to get themselves moving, and I think so far — of course, the meeting is still going on here, right down the hall — I think so far, the responses have been quite encouraging.

Besheer: So what do you think the game changer has been in the progress you’ve made against ISIS in Iraq and Syria? What was the key to it? Was it the choking [of] the funding or the military or a combination — I mean, what was the game changer?

McGurk: Well, I can go through a whole strategy. We have five lines of effort in the global strategy — we can go through that.

I want to make two points when it comes to Iraq. Number one, a very different way to fight the war on the ground. So when we say by, with and through, we really mean it. This was Iraqi-led. The Iraqis did the fighting, the Iraqis cleared their cities. It was the Iraqis who then held the cities and held the ground, the Iraqis working with local communities. The U.S. forces, coalition forces, were behind helping them and assisting them; we were not doing the fighting on the ground. And I think that model has actually proven to be quite effective.

Number two, we did an awful lot of diplomacy, and a lot of it behind the scenes — but not only to get the whole world organized to combat ISIS globally, to fight their networks, the finances, the foreign fighters, but also to have the region engage with Iraq. So, some of the biggest contributors here just down the hall today are really quite amazing. Turkey, one of the biggest contributors today — $5 billion of reconstruction assistance to Iraq. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE [United Arab Emirates], Kuwait, of course, with $2 billion. If you add all that up, it comes to a little less than $10 billion or so. UAE announced a fairly extraordinary private sector investment of $5 billion for an Iraqi housing project outside Baghdad. So, this engagement from the region was really not happening some years ago, and I give credit really to [Iraqi] Prime Minister [Haider al-]Abadi and his government. They reached out to the region and they helped build some bridges that had been closed.

So Saudi Arabia — you used the word “game changer.” I don’t really use that word too often, but Saudi Arabia for the first time in 30 years reopened its borders with Iraq a few months ago, direct flights from Saudi Arabia into Iraq for the first time in 30 years, and then you saw the investment the Saudis are just making now in Iraq. So, those are the types of shifts that are quite important and that we want to try to encourage to make sure that the defeat of ISIS is enduring.

Besheer: So, ISIS may be down and out in Iraq and Syria, but not so much in places like Libya, West Africa, Afghanistan. So how are you going to replicate the success you’ve had to date in those places? Is it a similar model or does it change with the environment?

​McGurk: It’s a great question. So each region is different, and we look at this — we look at this very carefully. I mean, every single day, 24/7, we’re looking at how the networks are emerging, where people are moving, how they’re getting money. So the one thing we have to do, of course: ISIS tries to be a global network. That’s what makes it different than kind of other terrorist organizations. It has become a metastasized global network. And so what we had to do was build a global network to fight the network. So, yesterday here just in Kuwait, we had all now 75 members of our coalition — Philippines joined just yesterday, so one of the largest coalitions in history — united to work together against this threat. And that’s the counterideology, the countermessaging. It’s the counterfinancing, it’s the counter-foreign fighters. And then we look at each different region of the world and who among the coalition wants to take the lead in that part of the world, and what particular tools might be needed, say, in Philippines versus Afghanistan versus in Iraq.

So every place is different, but by building this international consensus and this international coalition, that’s really the only way to stay ahead of the threat. We’re making progress, but the number one message yesterday in our coalition meetings is that we’ve made a lot of progress in the last three years, there’s no question — but this is not over. And that was the point from almost every delegation we heard yesterday: This isn’t over. We remain united as a coalition. We actually approved — all 75 delegations — a document called The Guiding Principles to guide the coalition as we go forward into the next year. And the key point of that is that this isn’t just about Iraq and Syria, it’s about the global campaign. So there was real unanimity in that room yesterday, led by Secretary Tillerson. And so you know, we’re going to stay at it. This isn’t over, and we’re going to keep our foot on the accelerator.

Besheer: Finally, I just like to ask you about accountability, because that’s a big issue. They found massive graves in liberated areas in Iraq, ISIL/ISIS-liberated areas. What about accountability for the victims of ISIS?

McGurk: So, this is also worth reminding people, what was happening in some of these areas not very long ago — you know, mass atrocities, acts of genocide, destroying our common heritage, thousands of young girls taken hostage and many of them are still missing, and we still meet with the families and we do all we can to find leads to try to rescue as many girls as we possibly can.

But, look, it gets back to the point I just made: We cannot rest against this enemy, and that means not only defeating them, but also following through and making sure that their defeat is enduring and they can’t come back, and that justice is done to those who committed these terrible crimes.

In Syria now, you know, they’re all trying to escape, so we have in Syria detained over 400 foreign fighters, including some of the most notorious former ISIS leaders, and we’re going to make sure that they can never get out. And we’re working with coalition countries and partners, if they happen to be their citizens, about how they are going to be prosecuted, how they’re going to be handled. This is a very difficult issue within our coalition. But we are very much determined that justice will be done for these terrible crimes.
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Blowing whistles and horns, thousands of Slovenian teachers rallied for higher wages on Wednesday in the latest in a string of strikes and protests by public sector workers in the small European Union country.

Most schools in Slovenia remained closed because of the one-day strike that drew an estimated 40,000 teachers. The strike follows earlier walk-outs by health care employees, police and firefighters.

More than 10,000 people gathered at a central square in the capital, Ljubljana, holding colorful banners and union balloons and flags. Participants were bused in from all over Slovenia.

“This government must surely know that the level of teachers’ salaries is a problem in Slovenia,” said Christine Blower from the European Trade Union Committee for Education, who came to offer support.

“Your demands are fair and just,” Blower told the cheering crowd. “You must win, you have the arguments!”

There was no immediate response from the government, which has negotiated with the public sector unions in the past months in a bid to avert wider strikes.

Workers’ unions are demanding that the wage growth curbed in an austerity package in 2013 be restored amid economic growth. The demands put pressure on the centrist government of Prime Minister Miro Cerar before a parliamentary election later this year.
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Actress Minnie Driver has resigned from her role as an Oxfam celebrity ambassador and corporate backers demanded accountability as the aid organization sought to address allegations that senior staff members working in crisis zones paid for sex among the desperate people the group was meant to serve.

The star of “Good Will Hunting” said she will no longer support the organization following its response to a sex abuse scandal in Haiti after its 2010 earthquake. Britain’s top development official has savaged the leadership of Oxfam for its handling of the scandal.

Driver tweeted: “All I can tell you about this awful revelation about Oxfam is that I am devastated. Devastated for the women who were used by people sent there to help them, devastated by the response of an organization that I have been raising awareness for since I was 9 years old #oxfamscandal.”

The anti-poverty organization has been reeling since the Times of London reported last week that seven former Oxfam staff members who worked in Haiti faced misconduct allegations that included using prostitutes and downloading pornography. Oxfam says it investigated, but the government and charity regulators have criticized its lack of transparency in its handling of the matter.

U.K. Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt has warned that government funding to the group – some 31.7 million pounds ($43.8 million) – is at risk unless it comes clean about the allegations. Amid fears that sex predators have targeted aid organizations to get access to the vulnerable, Mordaunt told a conference in Sweden that she would be meeting with the National Crime Agency on Thursday to underscore her concerns.

“While investigations have to be completed and any potential criminals prosecuted accordingly, what is clear is that the culture that allowed this to happen needs to change and it needs to change now,” she said.

Oxfam’s corporate partners, including Mark & Spencer, Heathrow Airport and Waterstones, are asking questions. Visa, for example, which developed a partnership with Oxfam to help distribute funds to people hit by natural disaster, said it is watching closely.

“At Visa, we are committed to the highest standards of professional and personal conduct, and we expect the same from our partners,” the company said. “We are engaged with Oxfam to understand what steps have been taken to address staff misconduct and ensure alignment with our own standards and values.”
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When a Vatican court convicted a Chilean predator priest of sex crimes, it went out of its way to affirm the credibility of his victims. Their testimony had been consistent and corroborated, while their motives in coming forward had been only to “free themselves of a weight that had tormented their consciences,” the tribunal said.

One key witness in the Rev. Fernando Karadima’s 2010 trial is preparing to testify again, this time in a spinoff case with potentially more significant consequences. Juan Carlos Cruz’s allegations of a cover-up raise questions about Pope Francis’ already shaky track record on preventing clergy sex abuse and concealment.

Cruz has accused Chilean Bishop Juan Barros of having been present when Karadima kissed and fondled him as a 17-year-old, and of then ignoring the abuse. One of Francis’ top advisers has privately called Cruz a liar who is out to destroy the Chilean church. Francis, who has called allegations against Barros slander, may have accepted the adviser’s take.

After his defense of Barros sparked an outcry during his recent trip to Chile, Francis did an about-face and asked Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, a former Vatican sex crimes investigator, to gather testimony about Barros and then report back. Cruz, who now works in communications in the U.S., is his first witness Saturday.

“We’ve been giving this testimony for years and years, but finally it’s being heard,” Cruz told The Associated Press. “So when the pope says he needs evidence, he’s had it for a long time.”

Francis named Barros to head the diocese of Osorno, Chile in January 2015 over the opposition of some Chilean bishops. They were worried about fallout from the Karadima scandal, and had recommended that Barros and two other Karadima-trained bishops resign and take year-long sabbaticals.

Francis has said he rejected the recommendation because he couldn’t in good faith accept Barros’ resignation without any evidence of wrongdoing.

Barros has repeatedly denied witnessing any abuse or covering it up.

“I never knew anything about, nor ever imagined, the serious abuses which that priest committed against the victims,” he told the AP last month.

Dozens of former parishioners and seminarians have told Chilean and Vatican prosecutors about how public Karadima’s groping was, including of minors, within the tight-knit community where Barros was a top lieutenant of the now-disgraced priest. A handful of victims have also told the courts how, behind closed doors, Karadima would masturbate his young charges, and have them confess on their knees in front of his crotch.

Francis recently sparked an outcry when he called the accusations against Barros “calumny” and said none of Karadima’s victims had brought forth evidence to implicate the bishop.

The AP reported last week that Cruz did come forward with cover-up accusations against Barros. The pope’s top abuse adviser, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, hand-delivered to Francis an eight-page letter from Cruz in April 2015.

Cruz says Barros not only witnessed him being abused, but then tormented him with private information that Karadima had obtained from Cruz during confession.

“If Karadima felt that you were not being too dedicated to him in any way, he would ice you. He would not talk to you, but he would send these hatchet men, Juan Barros was one of them,” said Cruz, who after joining Karadima’s community went onto the seminary, only to leave after a few years.

The Vatican hasn’t commented on whether Francis read the 2015 letter.

Barros himself hasn’t been accused of sexually abusing anyone, and merely witnessing a superior kiss and grope minors isn’t a canonical crime. Perhaps Francis doesn’t consider it a fireable offense.

But Francis’ own sex abuse advisers, as well as many Osorno faithful, have argued that Barros’ failure to “see” Karadima’s abuse and his continued denial that it was around him raises questions about whether he can protect children in Osorno today.

Since Barros has not been charged with any wrongdoing, Cruz’s allegations against him have not been subject to legal scrutiny. However, Vatican and Chilean prosecutors both considered him to be a credible witness in cases against Karadima, during which he also testified about Barros’ presence while he was being groped. Other Karadima victims have said the same.

“The tribunal has acquired sufficient conviction to accept Cruz’s testimony as proof of the facts,” Chilean investigating Judge Jessica Gonzalez wrote in 2011. While Gonzalez dropped criminal charges against Karadima, she stressed it wasn’t for lack of proof but because too much time had passed.

In the decree sentencing Karadima to a lifetime of penance and prayer, the Vatican tribunal said it had acquired the “moral certainty of the truth” about Karadima’s guilt based on testimony from Cruz and other whistleblowers, even though many bishops, priests and laity insisted Karadima was innocent.

Some high-ranking church officials, though, have continued to question Cruz’s veracity and motives. Among them is Chilean Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz, a top adviser to Francis as a member of the pope’s “kitchen cabinet” of cardinals.

While Francis and Errazuriz have ideological differences, it would be natural for the pope to ask the head of the Chilean church about a Chilean bishop who had once worked for him. And Errazuriz and the Argentinian pope have known each other for decades, when both men served as archbishops in their neighboring countries.

Errazuriz publicly apologized in 2010 for not believing Karadima’s victims initially. Privately, he has called Cruz a liar and a “serpent” bent on destroying the Catholic Church in Chile, according to emails first published by Chilean online newspaper El Mostrador.

The emails Errazuriz exchanged in 2013 and 2014 with his successor as Santiago’s archbishop show him maneuvering to keep Cruz off the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors — Francis’ advisory panel on sex abuse — and from the list of speakers for an annual bishops’ gathering.

“We know the intention of Mr. Cruz toward you and the church in Santiago,” Cardinal Riccardo Ezzati, the archbishop of Santiago, wrote Errazuriz in April 2013. “I hope we can avoid the lies from finding a place with those in the same church.”

Errazuriz responded the next day: “May the serpent not prevail!”

“There’s no reason to invite Carlos Cruz, who will falsify the truth,” Errazuriz wrote. “He’s going to use the invitation to continue damaging the church.”

Errazuriz and Ezzati had a reason to try to discredit Cruz. After evidence emerged showing the Santiago archdiocese had received reports about Karadima for years but shelved an initial investigation, Cruz and two other victims sued the archdiocese in 2013 for an alleged cover-up.

The litigation, since dismissed for insufficient proof, was active in April 2015 when Cruz’s letter made its way to Cardinal O’Malley. A member of the Pontifical Commission, Marie Collins, gave it to O’Malley when she flew to Rome with three other commissioners to raise alarm at Barros’ appointment as bishop of Osorno.

O’Malley was in Rome anyway for a meeting with the pope, Errazuriz and Francis’ other cardinal advisers. A Vatican statement issued after their meeting suggests that O’Malley may have raised the Barros case, just as he reported to Collins and Cruz.

During the meeting, O’Malley proposed creating procedures “to evaluate and judge cases of ‘abuse of office’ concerning the safeguarding of minors” by bishops and other church leaders, it said.

The pope and his advisers subsequently agreed to establish a tribunal inside the Vatican to hear evidence against bishops who covered up sex abuse. Francis authorized a budget to fund it for five years.

But the proposal lagged. Within a year, Francis had scrapped it entirely and instead issued a document essentially saying the church’s existing procedures were sufficient to handle alleged cover-ups.
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Pilot error as well as malfunctioning sensors likely caused a passenger jet to crash in Russia, killing all 71 people on board, investigators say.

After studying An-148’s flight data recorder, the Interstate Aviation Committee said that Sunday’s crash near Moscow occurred after the pilots saw varying data on the plane’s two air speed indicators.

The flawed readings came because the pilots failed to turn on a heating unit before the takeoff, the committee said. 

The plane’s captain reportedly didn’t want to defrost the aircraft before flying.  The procedure is optional and the crew’s decision is based mainly on the weather conditions.

The committee said it is continuing to study the data, but noted that “erroneous data on the pilots’ speed indicators may have been a factor that triggered the special flight situation.”

It said the flawed speed data resulted from the “icing of pressure measurement instruments that had their heating systems turned off.”

The Saratov Airlines Antonov An-148 took off Sunday from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport for a flight to the city of Orsk and went down in a field about 40 miles southeast of the capital.
…

Kosovo expects to resolve outstanding issues with Serbia this year by reaching an “historic” agreement that would pave the way for the Balkan country to get a seat at the United Nations, President Hashim Thaci said on Tuesday.

Kosovo seceded a decade ago from Serbia, but its independence has not been recognized by Belgrade, which together with its traditional allies Moscow and Beijing has blocked Pristina’s bid for a U.N. seat.

As Belgrade moves closer to membership in the European Union, Serbian authorities are under pressure to resolve relations with neighbors including Kosovo.

“The deal between Kosovo and Serbia, which I believe will happen in 2018, will be a historic, a comprehensive agreement which will result in Kosovo’s membership in United Nations,” Thaci told Reuters in an interview.

Serbia lost control over Kosovo in 1999 when NATO waged a bombing campaign to halt killings of ethnic Albanians in a two-year counter-insurgency war. Nearly a decade later, in 2008, Kosovo declared independence, backed by the United States and most of the Western European states.

Kosovo’s independence has been recognized by 115 states so far.

Thaci said the agreement with Serbia would bring full normalization of relations between the former foes, although they may not be required to recognize each other as independent states.

Kosovo’s relations with Western countries was soured by an initiative to scrap a law that established a war crimes court.

The initiative was shelved under pressure by Western embassies in Pristina, and the court was set up in 2015, although it has yet to hear a case.

The Specialist Chamber, which has the authority to try ex-Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas for alleged atrocities in the war that led to independence from Serbia, is part of Kosovo’s legal system but based in The Hague to minimize the risks of witness intimidation and judicial corruption.

Kosovo’s media have reported that some of the leading Kosovo politicians, including Thaci, who was commander of the KLA, could be indicted by the court or called to testify.

“This was an historic injustice but for the sake of keeping the strategic partnership with the US, EU and NATO we created that [the court],” Thaci said. “Kosovo has nothing to hide.”

Asked what he would do if called to testify as a witness or defendant by the court, he said: “The president or any other citizen of this country has no reason to be afraid.”

“We never violated Kosovo law or international laws. We have fought against a dictator, against a man who committed genocide,” he said, referring to former Yugoslav and Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, who died in 2006 while on trial for war crimes.

The 1.8 million-strong country is preparing for a big celebration on Saturday to commemorate the 10th anniversary of its declaration of independence. Kosovo-born British singer Rita Ora is due to hold a big concert in Pristina.
…

A Slovak court has rejected a demand by Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis to be cleared of cooperation with the communist-era secret police (StB), a court spokesman said on Tuesday.

The ruling concludes a lengthy legal battle started by Babis, a Slovak-born billionaire businessman who rose last year to the top of the political ladder in the neighbouring Czech Republic, Slovakia’s former partner in the Czechoslovak federation that fell apart in 1993.

The decision is mainly of symbolic value. It does not stop Babis from holding office nor from attempting to form a new government after his minority administration failed to win a vote of confidence in the Czech parliament last month.

A spokesman for Czech President Milos Zeman said on Twitter the decision did not mean any change in the president’s plan to appoint Babis as prime minister again.

Former secret agents involved

Babis, helped by evidence provided by former communist-era secret agents, won the initial court battles in the case, but his fortunes turned when the Slovak Constitutional Court ruled last year that those witnesses were unreliable.

It also ruled that Babis’s suit against the Slovak UPN institute which keeps communist-era files was misplaced, saying the institute was only the keeper, not the author, of the files, which were compiled by the StB itself.

The Constitutional Court sent the case back to the Bratislava regional court for a final ruling, which was made on Jan. 30 but not published until Tuesday.

‘We will sue until death’

Babis has admitted to meetings with StB officers in the 1980s in the former Czechoslovakia when he was a Communist Party member and worked in foreign trade, but he insists he only discussed the country’s economic interests.

For some Czechs and Slovaks, the injustices of the communist era of their joint past are still raw nearly 30 years on, but Babis’s ANO party still easily won the Czech election in October with nearly 30 percent of the vote.

Babis said on Tuesday he would fight the ruling with another lawsuit, although he did not know yet where it would be addressed.

“We will sue until death because we are in the right,” he told the online version of daily MF Dnes.

Faces fraud charges

Babis moved to Prague in the 1990s and built up his Agrofert chemicals and farming business before entering politics in 2011.

Babis is also facing fraud charges in the Czech Republic in a case involving 2 million euros in European Union and national subsidies a decade ago. That is the main reason other parties have refused to join a Babis-led government.

He denies any wrongdoing and ANO has refused to nominate another candidate for the post of prime minister.

 
…

French President Emmanuel Macron said his government is preparing to take fundamental steps to completely reform the lives and organizational structures of Muslims in the country. 

Speaking to Journal du Dimanche, Macron said he wants to bring an end to disputes nationwide triggered by jihadi attacks over the last few years. 

According to the French president, the reforms that will be initiated in the first quarter of 2018 include the fight against Islamic fundamentalism, restructure Muslim organizations and regulate their relations with the rest of the society. 

Macron told the newspaper that his government’s reform project is still underway, so declined to speak about the details before it is complete. He said the country’s intellectuals and academics continue to exchange ideas to lay the groundworks of the project while referring to the need to reform what he terms, “the problematic ties between Islam and the French Republic.” 

France is a secular country by constitution. The country has a special law since 1905 requiring the separation of church and state, also prohibiting the state from recognizing or funding any religion. Recent debates included amending the current law, but Macron is known to be against the idea. “Whatever we opt to do, my goal is to stimulate the very principle that exists within the heart of that law on secularity. In other words, to keep the rights to believe or not to believe, the free will and national harmony.”

The French government wants to find a nationwide solution to the issue of financing and training Islamic clergy. Paris says other governments meddle in the nation’s affairs when they directly finance mosques and appoint imams despite the existing law on secularity. The government is looking for ways to finance mosques, regulate charities, raise funds to train imams and perhaps tax halal products to raise funding. 

The French government is reportedly working on the reforms through the president’s office, the Ministry of the Interior and the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) which was set up in 2003 by then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. While Elysee Palace is in touch with Islam experts, academics and intellectuals, the ministry works through its own experts. The CFCM’s own report on the proposed reforms will be ready in June.

​While the planned reforms aim to curb foreign influence on mosques and imams in France, it also proposes to require imams to take university-level studies where they will be taught secularism, civil liberties, theology, religious history and sociology. Also among the proposals is the election of a Chief Imam – like the existing Chief Rabbi of France in the case of Jews – to lead the French Muslims as the sole religious and moral authority and a strong communal representative. 

When Macron received France’s religious leaders in December last year, he reportedly said he wanted Islam (in France) restructured and asked the CFCM to create a working group to contribute to the project. Macron also wants to change the structure of the CFCM, a non-profit whose management is still influenced by leading Muslim countries. 

The CFCM itself also reportedly backs the proposed reforms. Anouar Kbibech, the vice-chairman of the organization said, there is already an awareness within the organization to reach out to the rest of French society. Ahmet Ogras, the CFCM’s Turkish-French chairman also says the organization has also been pressing for reforms. 

The leader of the country’s nationalist party, Marine Le Pen rebuffed the project as “unacceptable” and she called on the government to stop financial aid to mosques. However the leader of Front National said she supports the idea of stopping foreign influence on French mosques. 

A recent survey by Institut Francais de l’Opinion Publique (IFOp) shows 56 percent of the participants agree to Islam and the French society can coexist. In 2016, at the peak of the jihadi attacks in France, that rate was 43 percent.
…

A London court will rule on Tuesday whether it would be in the interests of justice to pursue action against WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange for failing to surrender to bail back in 2012.

If the judge rules in his favor, then Assange, 46, would be free to leave the Ecuadorean Embassy in London where he has been holed up for more than five years.

However, he might still elect to remain in the embassy, where he has been granted political asylum, because he fears Britain would arrest him under a U.S. extradition warrant, the existence of which has neither been confirmed nor denied.

Who is Julian Assange?

Assange was born in Townsville, Australia, in July 1971, to parents who were involved in theater and traveled frequently.

In his teens, Assange gained a reputation as a sophisticated computer programmer and in 1995 he was arrested and pleaded guilty to hacking. He was fined, but avoided prison on condition he did not reoffend.

In his late 20s, he went to Melbourne University to study mathematics and physics.

Wikileaks

Assange launched WikiLeaks in 2006, creating a web-based “dead letter drop” for would-be leakers. It says it is a non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, journalists and the general public, with the aim of fighting government and corporate corruption.

The website rose to prominence in April 2010 when it published a classified video showing a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff.

In July that year, it released more than 90,000 classified U.S. military documents on the war in Afghanistan and then in October, it published about 400,000 more secret U.S. files on the Iraq war. The two leaks represented the largest security breaches of their kind in U.S. military history.

It followed these up with the release of 250,000 secret diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world, with some of the information published by newspapers such as the New York Times and Britain’s Guardian.

The leaks angered and embarrassed U.S. politicians and military officials, who said the unauthorized dissemination would put lives at risk, and drew similar condemnation from U.S. allies such as Britain.

Arrest in 2010

On Nov. 18, 2010, a Swedish court ordered Assange’s detention as a result of an investigation into allegations of sex crimes.

He had spent much of the year in Sweden and the accusations of misconduct were made by two female Swedish WikiLeaks volunteers. On Dec. 7, 2010, Assange was arrested by British police on a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) issued by Sweden.

Assange denied the allegations and was eventually granted bail on Dec. 16. He said from the outset that he believed the Swedish case was a pretext to extradite him to the United States to face charges over the WikiLeaks releases.

His extradition to Sweden for questioning was ordered in Feb. 2011.

Subsequent appeals failed and an order for his surrender was issued for June 29, 2012. On June 19, he entered the Ecuadorean Embassy in the upmarket Knightsbridge area of London seeking asylum.

Ten days later a judge at London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court issued a warrant for his arrest.

Ecuadorean Embassy

Ecuador granted Assange asylum on Aug. 16, 2012 and at the time he said he expected to wait six months to a year for a deal which would allow him to leave the embassy. British police mounted a round-the-clock guard to prevent his escape, saying he would be arrested should he leave.

The impasse left Assange living in cramped quarters in the embassy with no political or legal solution to the saga in sight. A United Nations panel said in Feb. 2016 that Assange had been arbitrarily detained. Britain called that description “ridiculous”, saying his detention was voluntary.

British police ended their permanent guard in October 2015, having spent an estimated 12.6 million pounds, but said they would maintain “covert tactics” to arrest him if he left the embassy.

Swedish Case Dropped

On Nov. 14, 2016, Swedish prosecutors questioned Assange at the embassy in London about the alleged sex crimes for about four hours.

Swedish prosecutors announced on May 19, 2017, that they had dropped their investigation and withdrawn their EAW. However, British police said he would still be arrested if he left the embassy because there was an outstanding warrant for failing to surrender to bail.

In January this year, Ecuador granted Assange citizenship after Britain refused a request for him to be given diplomatic status, saying he would face justice if he left the embassy.

New Court Challenge

On Jan. 26, Assange’s lawyers asked London’s Westminster Magistrates Court to drop the arrest warrant against him because it no longer applied as Sweden’s EAW had been withdrawn.

They said Assange and his guarantors had forfeited more than 110,000 pounds ($156,000) when he failed to surrender and he had already spent 5-1/2 years in conditions which were “akin to imprisonment.”

Last Tuesday, Judge Emma Arbuthnot rejected his bid to have the warrant withdrawn. However, she then agreed to consider whether, even if Assange were arrested and brought to court, it would actually be in the interests of justice to take any further action against him.

Her ruling will be made on Tuesday and if he is successful, it would mean there was no public, legal case in Britain against him.

U.S. Criminal Investigation

During his successful election campaign, U.S. President Donald Trump praised Assange’s organization for releasing hacked emails from Democratic National Committee (DNC) computers, telling a rally in Oct. 2016 “I love WikiLeaks.”

There is no public record or evidence demonstrating any U.S. criminal charges are pending against Assange. When Barack Obama was president, the U.S. Justice Department leadership concluded it would be inappropriate to prosecute WikiLeaks because it was too similar to a media organization.

However in March last year, U.S. federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia, expanded a long-running grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks and its personnel including Assange. A Justice Department official recently confirmed to Reuters this investigation was still open.

Last April, CIA Director Mike Pompeo described WikiLeaks as a “hostile intelligence service” abetted by states such as Russia, who had used it to distribute hacked material from DNC computers during the 2016 presidential election. He also called Assange a “fraud” and a “coward.”

Assange and his supporters believe that U.S. prosecutors have a sealed, therefore secret, indictment against him. They also suspect that Britain has received a U.S. extradition warrant linked to these charges and that he would be arrested by British police were he to leave the embassy.

They hope if his court case is successful, it will put pressure on the British authorities to disclose what, if any, U.S. efforts are in place to prosecute him.
…

President Vladimir Putin on Monday passed greetings from U.S. President Donald Trump to the visiting Palestinian leader, who responded that he doesn’t want to  cooperate with Washington following its decision to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.

Speaking at the start of their meeting in the Kremlin, Putin told Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that he was just off the phone with Trump. 

“Naturally, we spoke about the Palestinian-Israeli settlement,” he said “I would like to convey to you his best wishes.”

Abbas responded that the Palestinians don’t want to cooperate with the United States as a sponsor of the peace process, but welcome multilateral cooperation.

Trump honored a campaign promise in December by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and vowing to relocate the U.S. Embassy there. 

The move outraged Palestinians and others across the Muslim world. Palestinian leaders have said it means that Washington can no longer serve as a Mideast peace broker.

“We refuse to cooperate with the Americans as co-sponsors,” Abbas told Putin in remarks carried by Russian news agencies. “President Trump again surprised us. His decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and consider Jerusalem the capital of Israel was like a slap in our face.”
…

Russian teams of emergency workers and investigators searched a snow-covered field outside Moscow Monday, looking for body fragments and clues after a plane crashed a day earlier, killing all 71 people on board, including the crew and three children.

The 65 passengers on board were from 5 to 79-years-old, according to a list posted by the Russian Emergencies Ministry, which did not give their nationalities.

More than 400 people and 70 vehicles were deployed to the crash site, the ministry said.

WATCH: Crash

​President Vladimir Putin ordered a special commission to investigate what caused the Antonov AN-148 plane to go down shortly after taking off.

Human error, technical failure and weather conditions are among the several possible cause, according to Russia’s Investigative Committee, which did not mention the possibility of terrorism. 

The regional jet, operated by Saratov Airlines, was traveling from Domodedovo airport, to the city of Orsk in the Orenburg region when it crashed near Argunovo, about 80 kilometers southeast of Moscow.

The seven-year-old plane disappeared from the radar just minutes after departing from the capital city’s second busiest airport and was falling up to 6,700 meters per minute in the last seconds of the crash, flight-tracking site FlightRadar24 reported.

Russian media reported that search crews had found one flight recorder but it is not clear if it is the data or voice recorder.

Putin offered “his profound condolences to those who lost their relatives in the crash,” according to his spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

U.S. President Donald Trump joined world leaders in offering condolences to Putin and the Russian people. “The United States is deeply saddened by the tragic deaths of those on board Saratov Airlines Flight 703. We send our condolences to the families of those who lost their lives and to the people of Russia,” a statement released by the White House said.

The Domodedovo airport has been the focus of security concerns in the past. It came under sharp criticism in 2004, after Chechen suicide bombers destroyed two airliners that took off from the airport on the same evening, killing a total of 90 people. A 2011 bombing in the arrivals area killed 37 people. 

Shabby equipment and poor supervision plagued Russian civil aviation for years after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, but the safety record has improved in recent years.
…

Russian authorities are investigating the cause of a passenger plane crash near Moscow on Sunday. All 71 people on board are thought to have died in the crash. Fragments of the An-148 plane have been found near the village of Stepanovskoye, about 40 kilometers from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports weather conditions, pilot error or a technical malfunction are among the possible causes.
…

The British government is warning charities and humanitarian relief organizations that it will withdraw public funding if they fail to establish effective internal reviews to prevent and investigate sexual predatory behavior and abuse by their aid workers. 

The warning came Sunday in the wake of disclosures that one of the country’s biggest charities, Oxfam, failed to disclose its dismissal in 2011 of senior aid workers who paid local prostitutes, some likely under-age, for sex parties in Haiti in the wake of a devastating earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and left 300,000 injured and 1.5 million homeless.

Four men were fired and three were allowed to resign, including Oxfam’s country director for Haiti. But they were also given references by Oxfam, enabling them to join other aid agencies, despite allegations of sexual exploitation of quake survivors and the downloading of pornography, as well as bullying and intimidation. 

A 2011 internal report that wasn’t made public uncovered “a culture of impunity” and noted, “it cannot be ruled out that any of the prostitutes were under-aged.” 

Oxfam failed to provide full details to Britain’s Charity Commission, a regulatory body, about the probe and what the charity’s critics called an exercise of power over vulnerable people.

And it didn’t inform Haiti’s government — a disclosure that has prompted the Haitian ambassador in London to demand a formal public apology from the aid agency. 

Penny Mordaunt, Britain’s international development minister, condemned Sunday what she described as “horrible behavior” by Oxfam staff in Haiti and said public funding of the charity is now in jeopardy. She has threatened to pull government funding not only from Oxfam but from any British charity that falls below expected standards.

“With regard to Oxfam and any organization that has safeguarding issues, we expect them to cooperate fully, and we will cease to fund any organization that does not,” she said.

Oxfam received $45 million from the British government in 2017 and received more than $200 million in donations from the British public. Now, there are also questions about similar behavior by Oxfam aid workers in Chad more than a decade ago.

“I am affording them the opportunity to tell me in person what they did after these events, and I’m going to be looking to see if they are displaying the moral leadership that I think they need to now,” Mordaunt said in a television interview. “If they do not hand over all the information that they have from their investigation and subsequently to the relevant authorities, including the Charity Commission and prosecuting authorities, then I cannot work with them any more as an aid delivery partner,” she said.

The minister has informed all British charities that receive government funds that they must declare all “safeguarding concerns” or lose funding.

But Mordaunt’s predecessor, Priti Patel, said the government doesn’t have the moral high ground on the issue and fears the problem is more widespread. 

“Predatory pedophiles” have been allowed to exploit the aid sector, she said Sunday. Patel said when she was international development minister, she faced obstruction from her ministerial staff and “internal pushback” when trying to probe exploitation claims against aid workers.

“I did my own research, and I have to say, I had a lot of pushback within my own department. I pushed hard — I had pushback internally, and that is the scandal. The scandal is within the industry, people know about this,” the former minister said, wondering why there were no prosecutions.

Figures analyzed by Britain’s Sunday Times revealed that in the past year alone, more than 120 workers for Britain’s top charities have been accused of sexual abuse, harassment or predatory behavior, mostly while serving overseas.

Oxfam recorded 87 incidents in 2017, of which 53 cases were referred to police or civilian authorities. Save the Children had 31 cases, 10 of which were referred to authorities 

Oxfam has admitted it made an error in failing to make public the Haiti sex scandal and the details of its investigation. Oxfam’s chief executive, Mark Goldring, said the charity is ashamed but has denied it sought to cover up the scandal. 

“What we wanted to do was get on and deliver an aid program,” Golding said. In a radio interview Saturday, he expressed regret for not addressing the issue. 

“With hindsight, I would much prefer we had talked about sexual misconduct,” he said.

Paying for sex is in breach of not only Oxfam’s code of conduct but the United Nations’ codes for the aid workers it funds. Oxfam did announce publicly that there had been misconduct in Haiti and that some staff had been terminated, but it did not reveal the misbehavior to Britain’s Charity Commission. 

Oxfam isn’t alone in scandals involving Haiti. Last year, U.N. peacekeepers in the country were accused of participating in sex rings using food as a lure.

A Save the Children report in 2008 said sex exploitation by aid workers was under-reported generally in countries hit by devastating disasters, man-made or natural. 

“Children as young as six are trading sex with aid workers and peacekeepers for food, money, soap,” the report said. 
…

Forget the Winter Olympics, the Champion’s League or the Super Bowl. The real competition right now is who’s going to be invited to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding.

Everyone who is anyone in Britain is angling for an embossed royal ticket.

British heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua, who is seeking to add two more world championships to the three he already owns, says he would be happy to interrupt his high-level training for a trip to Windsor Castle on May 19. The ebullient Joshua has not been shy, tweeting a picture of himself and Harry with the question “Need a best man?”

“I’m single,” the 28-year-old told the BBC, expressing an interest in seeing if the elegant, raven-haired Markle’s “got any sisters.”

(For the record Anthony, she has a half sister, 53-year-old Samantha Grant, a divorced mother of three who has called Markle “a social climber.”)

The actual guest list is a closely guarded secret – and details about it may not be released until the event is underway. But that hasn’t stopped speculation about who’s in or who’s out from becoming a national parlor game and the subject of wagers in Britain’s legal betting shops.

Any bride and groom run into parental interference in their guest list, whether it’s adding random cousins or forgotten neighbors. Yet Harry and Markle are enduring this phenomenon at a cosmic level due to the royal expectations that come along with being a grandson of Queen Elizabeth II.

At least Harry and Markle won’t face the 3,500 guests that his parents, Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, welcomed to their 1981 “wedding of the century” in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.They also avoided the warehouse-sized Westminster Abbey, where Harry’s brother Prince William and Kate Middleton packed in 1,900 guests for a 2011 royal wedding extravaganza televised around the world.

Their wedding venue, St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, holds a mere 800 guests. Even so, it’s going to be tough to cut that list.

The British royals’ close relatives alone number over 50 – and this time Princess Eugenie gets to bring a plus-one, fiance Jack Brooksbank. Harry also won’t forget non-royals like Kate’s sister, Pippa Middleton, her husband James Mathews, and brother James Middleton.

At William’s wedding, 45 foreign royals from 20 countries were invited from nations as diverse as Spain, Norway, Malaysia, Thailand and Saudi Arabia. William also invited governor generals from Commonwealth countries (23 seats); foreign dignitaries (27); U.K. politicians (42); religious figures (31); senior military officers (14) and 80 workers from charities that he backs. Oh – and don’t forget the ambassadors from countries with ties to Britain.

William barely could squeeze in A-listers like David Beckham and TV adventure host Ben Fogle – who may return for Harry’s nuptials.

Britain’s governing elite – Prime Minister Theresa May, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond – would normally expect a Windsor invite. But with turmoil over Brexit roiling the ruling Conservative Party, perhaps the bride and groom should just wait until a week before the wedding, then invite whoever is still left standing.

The juiciest debate has been over invites for rival U.S. presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Harry and Obama have obvious chemistry and have worked together promoting Harry’s Invictus Games competition for wounded soldiers. Some British officials, however, fear that an invite to Obama would anger Trump.

The royals could note that Obama, the U.S. president in 2011, was not invited to William’s wedding. And they have a bit more leeway because Harry’s wedding is not considered a state event. Markle, meanwhile, is a Hillary Clinton fan.

“We’ve changed our minds on this. We think Harry is in a position that he does not have to worry about the political implications of an invite,” said Rupert Adams, a spokesman for the betting agency William Hill PLC. “We feel strongly that the Obamas will get an invite.”

As for Trump?

“We’d be very surprised to see him on the guest list,” Adams said.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has a trifecta of ties to the bride and groom:He’s the head of a Commonwealth country, host of Harry’s latest Invictus Games and leader of the nation where Markle had been living.

On the celebrity front, Elton John, who turned his song “Candle in the Wind” into an anthem for the late Princess Diana, is considered a 1-50 lock for an invite (98 percent chance) and singer James Blunt comes in at 1-4. Singer/songwriter Ed Sheeran is also reportedly close to Harry’s royal cousins and his U.K. tour doesn’t start until a few days later.

The betting for wedding performer includes John, Sheeran, Coldplay, Joss Stone and Adele.

Violet von Westenholz who introduced the couple will get a nod, along with Harry’s buddies Thomas and Charlie van Straubenzee, Thomas Inskip and Arthur Landon.

Yet A-listers could find themselves outnumbered by British military members and charity workers. Look for dress uniforms from both the Blues and Royals regiment and the Army Air Corps, because Harry served as a former Apache helicopter co-pilot in Afghanistan.

“You create significant bonds in a war zone,” noted Adams.

Among the 10 guests that Markle is allowed to pick [just kidding] will be her mom Doria Ragland, dad Thomas, half brother Thomas Jr. and possibly Grant. Markle’s friends include tennis star Serena Williams, stylist Jessica Mulroney, “Suits” star Patrick J. Adams and former “Made in Chelsea” cast member Millie Macintosh.

Markle’s ex-husband, producer Trevor Engelson, is not expected to receive an invitation.

But William Hill spokesman Adams admits that British bookies don’t really have a clue about who the 36-year-old American will invite.

“The simple reality is … we have been focusing on Harry over here,” Adams said.
…

The World Health Organization is calling for resolute action to end violence against children. WHO’s appeal comes in advance of a meeting in Stockholm, Sweden this week that will seek solutions to the problem of violence, which affects one out of every two children on this planet.

The upcoming conference will explore ways to achieve the U.N.’s sustainable development goal of ending violence against children by 2030. But, the statistics weigh heavily against this aspiration.

The World Health Organization reports one half of the two billion children on earth, aged between two and 17, are victims of physical, sexual or emotional violence, or neglect. This violence, it says, occurs in the home behind closed doors or in schools. It involves bullying and violent behavior between young people. It says violence thrives in situations of conflict and other fragile settings.

The ultimate consequence of violence is death. WHO Director of Non-Communicable Diseases, Etienne Krug, says homicide is one of the three leading causes of death for adolescents.

“But, beyond that, there are also for those that survive, which is the vast majority a wide array of health consequences — mental health consequences, depression, anxiety, insomnia, changes in behavior,” he said. “They are more likely to smoke, to drink alcohol, to engage in risky sexual behavior, which leads to HIV, NCDs, etc.”

Krug says violence is not inevitable.It is predictable and preventable. He says the Stockholm conference will consider seven strategies for ending violence against children.

These include the enforcement of laws against this practice, changing norms so violence is no longer acceptable, dealing with aggressive behavior of boys, creating safer environments and teaching young parents how to be good parents.
…

All 71 people aboard a Russian passenger plane were killed when it crashed near Moscow, Russian officials said Sunday.

“Sixty-five passengers and six crew members were on board, and all of them died,” Russia’s office of transport investigations said in a statement.

The seven-year-old plane disappeared from the radar just minutes after departing from the capital city’s second largest airport, Domodedovo and was falling up to 6,700 meters per minute in the last seconds of the crash, flight-tracking site FlightRadar24 reported.

The An-148 regional jet, operated by Saratov Airlines, was traveling from Domodedovo, to the city of Orsk when it crashed near Argunovo, about 80 kilometers southeast of Moscow.

Russian president Vladimir Putin offered “his profound condolences to those who lost their relatives in the crash,” his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

The crash site was covered in heavy snow, delaying access to the area as rescue workers had to park their cars and travel to the crash site on foot.

The cause of the crash is currently unknown, though Russia’s transport ministry said it is investigating bad weather and human error as possible explanations.

 
…

Britain’s Charity Commission must conduct a “full and urgent investigation” into Oxfam following an alleged cover-up of its staff hiring prostitutes in Haiti during a 2011 relief effort on the earthquake-hit island, the prime minister’s office said Saturday.

“The reports of what is unacceptable behavior by senior aid workers in Haiti are truly shocking,” a spokeswoman for Theresa May said. “We want to see Oxfam provide all the evidence they hold of the events to the Charity Commission for a full and urgent investigation of these very serious allegations.”

The call came as the British charities regulator released its own statement detailing Oxfam’s previous disclosure of the events, including that it characterized the misconduct as “inappropriate sexual behavior.”

“Our approach to this matter would have been different had the full details that have been reported been disclosed to us at the time,” the commission said.

It confirmed that it had asked Oxfam to urgently provide fresh information.

Late on Friday, the Department for International Development (DFID) also said it was reviewing its relationship with the U.K.-based charity, to which it gave nearly $44 million last year.

It said Oxfam’s leaders had “showed a lack of judgment” in their handling of the matter and their level of openness with the government and Charity Commission.

‘Appalling abuse’

“The international development secretary is reviewing our current work with Oxfam and has requested a meeting with the senior team at the earliest opportunity,” a DFID spokeswoman said. “The way this appalling abuse of vulnerable people was dealt with raises serious questions that Oxfam must answer.”

Oxfam Chief Executive Mark Goldring said Saturday that the charity receives less than 10 percent of its funding from DFID and hoped to continue working with the department while rebuilding trust with the public. 

He admitted Oxfam did not give full details of the scandal to the commission in 2011 but insisted it “did anything but cover it up.”

“With hindsight, I would much prefer that we had talked about [the] sexual misconduct,” Goldring told BBC radio. “But I don’t think it was in anyone’s best interest to be describing the details of the behavior in a way that was actually going to draw extreme attention to it.”

The charity is under growing pressure after an investigation by The Times found young sex workers had been hired by senior staff in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Groups of young prostitutes were invited to homes and guesthouses paid for by the charity for sex parties, according to one source who claimed to have seen footage of an orgy with sex workers wearing Oxfam T-shirts.

In further revelations Friday, the paper said Oxfam failed to warn other aid agencies about the staff involved, which allowed them to get jobs among vulnerable people in other disaster areas.

Roland van Hauwermeiren, 68, whom Oxfam said was forced to resign as Haiti country director in 2011 after allegedly admitting hiring prostitutes, went on to become head of mission for Action Against Hunger in Bangladesh from 2012 to 2014.

Good references received

The French charity told AFP it made pre-employment checks with Oxfam but that the U.K.-based organization “did not share with us the reasons for his resignation as head of mission in Haiti or the results of its internal inquiry.”

“Moreover we received positive references from former Oxfam staff — in their individual capacities — who worked with him,” including from a human resources staffer, a spokesman said.

In a statement, Oxfam denied providing positive references for those implicated.

It said the vast number of aid operations working around the globe made it impossible “to ensure that those found guilty of sexual misconduct were not re-employed in the sector.”

“Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do to stop individuals falsifying references, getting others that were dismissed to act as referees and claiming it was a reference from Oxfam,” a spokeswoman added.

And there was also nothing to stop them from getting former or current staff to provide a reference “in a personal capacity,” she said.

The charity said it launched an immediate investigation in 2011 that found a “culture of impunity” among some staff, but it denied trying to cover up the scandal.

During the probe, Oxfam dismissed four staff members and another three resigned, including van Hauwermeiren.

The charity also said it had yet to find evidence proving allegations that underage girls were involved.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel declined to comment Saturday on a Polish law that imposes jail terms for suggesting the country was complicit in the Holocaust, saying she did not want to wade into Poland’s internal affairs.

The law would impose prison sentences of up to three years for using the phrase “Polish death camps” and for suggesting “publicly and against the facts” that the Polish nation or state was complicit in Nazi Germany’s crimes.

“Without directly interfering in the legislation in Poland, I would like to say the following very clearly as German chancellor: We as Germans are responsible for what happened during the Holocaust, the Shoah, under National Socialism [Nazism],” Merkel said in her weekly video podcast.

She was responding to a question from a student who had asked whether the new Polish law curbs freedom of expression. Israel and the United States criticized President Andrzej Duda for signing the bill into law this week.

Israel says the law will curb free speech, criminalize basic historical facts and stop any discussion of the role some Poles played in Nazi crimes.

A Polish government spokeswoman welcomed Merkel’s remarks, the PAP news agency reported. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki will hold talks with Merkel in Berlin next week.

Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party has clashed with the European Union and human rights groups on a range of issues since taking power in late 2015. It says the law is needed to ensure that Poles are recognized as victims, not perpetrators, of Nazi aggression in World War II.

More than 3 million of the 3.2 million Jews who lived in pre-war Poland were killed by the Nazis, accounting for about half of all Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Jews from across the continent were sent to be killed at death camps built and operated by Germans in occupied Poland — home to Europe’s biggest Jewish community at the time.
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Skier Albin Tahiri will miss Kosovo’s 10th-anniversary celebrations next week — but as the country’s first winter Olympian, he thinks his 1.8 million compatriots will forgive him while he competes in the Pyeongchang Games that began Friday.

While it has long had snow-capped mountains offering steep slopes and deep powder, Kosovo didn’t exist as a country until it broke free from Serbia in 2008, nearly a decade after a NATO-led bombing campaign pushed out Serbian forces to end a brutal crackdown on ethnic Albanians during a two-year battle for independence.

Now the 28-year-old Tahiri will compete in all five alpine-ski events in South Korea, one of 115 countries that recognize Kosovo as a country.

“When I started skiing, Kosovo was not an independent country,” says the Slovenian-born Tahiri, who carried Kosovo’s flag into the Olympic Stadium during the opening ceremonies.

“My father always cheered for Kosovar athletes and I did it as well, so when Kosovo proclaimed independence I wanted to help by representing the country as an athlete,” he adds. 

Kosovo’s inclusion in the Olympics was not always a given.

Serbia lobbied hard to block Kosovo from being recognized as a separate Olympic country and it wasn’t until the International Olympic Committee granted such a status to Kosovo in late 2014 that it made its debut at the Summer Olympics two years later in Brazil, which still does not formally recognize Kosovo as an independent country.

Tahiri, who began skiing in Slovenia at the age of 7, collected enough World Cup points while studying dentistry.

Now given the chance to represent Kosovo, the birthplace of his father, Tahiri will have to compete against the world’s best skiers without access to a full-time equipment manager or his coach — who can’t travel with him to South Korea because of the cost.

‘Once-In-A-Lifetime Pressure’

With the lighting of the flame in Pyeongchang, Kosovo will be one of six countries competing in the Winter Olympics for the first time.

The young country officially marks its independence on Feb. 17, midway through the Olympics, which finish eight days later.

“For me as president of the country, for the state and Kosovar society, as well as for the whole world, the participation of Kosovo for the first time in the Olympic Winter Games in [South] Korea is [big] news,” Hashim Thaci, president of Kosovo, said on Feb. 5, during a ceremony presenting the official Kosovar flag to Tahiri.

“I hope that not only the participation [of Tahiri] will make news, but that we will also have the strong news of winning a medal,” Thaci added.

Thaci and the rest of the country still have the Rio Olympics fresh in their minds. That debut by Kosovo put the country on the sporting map as Majlinda Kelmendi made history by winning a gold medal in judo.

Kelmendi says she is proud that Kosovo will finally be represented in the Winter Olympics, and knows the pressure Tahiri faces as the hopes of a nation weigh on him as he glides down the slopes.

“I wish him all the best,” Kelmendi said in a Thursday Facebook video post. “I know you have responsibility, you will also be waving the flag, but enjoy this experience to the maximum. Believe me, it’s something that happens once in a lifetime, so all the best and feel proud for the country you represent,” she added.

RFE/RL’s Balkan Service contributed to this report.
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A new vocabulary program claims to dramatically accelerate a child’s understanding of language. As Faith Lapidus reports, the Mrs Wordsmith teaching system relies on cartoon drawings and short word exercises to boost academic achievement.
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The detention in northern Syria by U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters of two notorious British jihadists, the remaining members of a militant quartet that tortured and beheaded Western hostages, including American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, is being greeted with pleas by former Western captives of the terror group that they face trial.

Nicolas Henin, a French reporter held for 10 months by the British gang, has told British and U.S. broadcasters that he wants the militants to face justice for their crimes somewhere he and other former hostages and the relatives of murdered victims will be able to attend and testify. 

El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Amon Kotey, the last two members of the British quartet that Western hostages dubbed “The Beatles,” were captured last month by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in eastern Syria. News of their detention was reported Thursday by The New York Times. U.S. officials have confirmed their capture and say they were identified from their fingerprints and biometric data.

“This is the beginning of a process that will bring them eventually, hopefully, to a trial. Justice is just what I want,” Henin said. “What I want is a trial and a trial potentially that I can attend, so rather, a trial in London rather than one in Kobani in northern Syria.”

He rejected the idea of them facing a U.S. military commission in Guantanamo, saying that would risk a “denial of justice.”

“Guantanamo was opened 16 years ago. There hasn’t been a single trial there,” he said. 

Rights campaigners are urging the U.S. government not to transfer the men to Guantanamo. “They should prosecute them in U.S. federal court, not send them to Guantanamo,” said Laura Pitter of the Human Rights Watch.

“These men are accused of committing serious crimes, including torture, murder and other offenses. If they end up in [formal] U.S. custody, the U.S. should not jeopardize their prosecutions by sending them to the dysfunctional military commissions at Guantanamo where important cases involving serious crimes have languished for years.”

According to European captives who were freed by the Islamic State terror group in return for ransoms, the group of four British militants put their Western captives, especially the British and Americans, through rounds of excruciating suffering, routinely beating and waterboarding them and staging mock executions.

Thanks to IS propaganda videos, the gang quickly acquired a singular place in this century’s annals of terrorism. James Foley, the first of the Western hostages to be beheaded, was earmarked for the worst treatment of all, possibly because he had a brother who had served with U.S. forces in Afghanistan. 

“You could see the scars on his [Foley’s] ankles,” Jejoen Bontinck, a 19-year-old Belgian and convert to Islam, said in interviews later. Bontinck, a jihadist recruit who fell afoul of IS, shared a prison cell with Foley in 2013. “He told me how they had chained his feet to a bar and then hung the bar so that he was upside down from the ceiling. Then they left him there.”

Foley’s mother, Diane, told the BBC on Friday that the crimes of the British jihadists “are beyond imagination.” She says they need to face life in prison. “It doesn’t bring James back, but hopefully it protects others from this kind of crime.”

An international manhunt was launched by Western governments for the fighters in 2014 when IS released a video of Foley’s execution at the hands of an masked English-accented militant, who called himself “John” and was the leader of the gang. He was nicknamed by the British media “Jihadi John” and was later identified as Mohamed Emwazi, who was born in Kuwait, but was raised like the rest of the gang in west London.

He was killed in a drone strike in November 2015.

Another member of the gang, Aine Davis, was sentenced last year in Turkey to a seven-and-a-half-year prison term. He was charged with membership in a terrorist organization, but a weightier charge of preparing acts of terrorism, which carried the possibility of a longer sentence, was dropped by Turkish prosecutors for lack of sufficient evidence. 

U.S. officials say El Shafee Elsheikh, who fled from Sudan in the 1990s but grew up in London, and Alexanda Amon Kotey, whose ethnic background is Greek Cypriot, are providing information on the remaining IS structure and leaders. But it is unclear who has been interrogating them and whether British intelligence officers also have had access to the pair alongside U.S. counterterror officials. 

Family and friends of British photojournalist John Cantlie, a friend of Foley, who remains missing, say they hope the captured jihadists provide information about his whereabouts. Cantlie was used by IS to front propaganda videos.

The British IS gang also was responsible for the murder of U.S. aid worker Peter Kassig, according to freed captives, as well as David Haines, a British aid worker, and Alan Henning, a British taxi driver from Salford outside Manchester, who had volunteered to deliver humanitarian aid to Syria.  

Elsheikh traveled to Syria in 2012 and joined al-Qaida in Syria before switching to IS. U.S. officials say he took pleasure in staging crucifixions and waterboarding while an IS jailer. The two captured jihadists knew Emwazi in the British capital, where all three attended Al-Manaar mosque in west London. 

Officials on both sides of the Atlantic say the fate remains unclear of the captured jihadists, who may be considered non-state combatants. They could be handed over to the U.S. Justice Department to stand trial in the U.S. or be transferred to the U.S. military authorities to face a tribunal at Guantanamo Bay detention center. U.S. President Donald Trump recently signed an order to keep the detention center. 

Another option is for their fate to be left to the Kurdish authorities in northern Syria, but that option is being opposed by freed captives. French officials have raised the possibility of the pair standing trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which has jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. However, the U.S. is not a signatory to the court. 

The French position was echoed Friday by a British defense minister, Tobias Elwood, who said the two jihadists shouldn’t be tried before a U.S. military tribunal or sent back to Britain, but should face justice at The Hague in order to uphold the rule of law.

Relatives of other alleged victims have echoed Henin’s call for a trial.

Bethany Haines, the daughter of David Haines, posted on Facebook: “It’s brilliant that these evil people have been caught. The families will now have people to hold account for their loved ones death.”

She added, “No punishment is enough for these barbarians and in my opinion they should be sentenced to a slow painful death.”
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U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will press Turkey to release Americans detained by Ankara, and urge the NATO ally to show restraint in military operations in northern Syria, according to senior U.S. officials.

“At times like this, engagement is all the more important,” said a State Department official on Friday, while acknowledging, “It’s going to be a difficult conversation.”

Turkey is the second stop of Tillerson’s five-nation visit to the Middle East next week, following a visit to Jordan. He will also meet with senior officials from Lebanon, Egypt and Kuwait.

The top U.S. diplomat’s visit to Ankara comes amid escalated tensions between the two NATO allies over a series of disagreements, including human rights cases and the Syria crisis. 

“Look, it’s difficult. The rhetoric is hot, the Turks are angry and this is a difficult time to do business, but it’s our belief that there are still some very fundamental underlying shared interests,” the senior official said Friday.

U.S. citizen Serkan Golge, a NASA scientist who was arrested in July 2016, was convicted without credible evidence on Feb. 8 by Turkish authorities for being a member of a terror organization. On Feb. 1, Amnesty International’s Turkey chairman, Taner Kilic, was re-arrested and placed back in pretrial detention. Kilic is facing terrorism charges.

The State Department said it is deeply troubled by those cases and urged the Turkish government to “end the protracted state of emergency, to release those detained arbitrarily under emergency authorities, and to safeguard the rule of law consistent with Turkey’s own domestic and international obligations and commitments.”

In the year after a failed coup in July 2016, Turkey arrested more than 40,000 people and fired 125,000, including many from the police, army and judiciary. 

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Fethullah Gulen, an exiled cleric based in the U.S., of orchestrating the attempted coup. Gulen has denied any role in the plot. Ankara has also asked Washington to extradite Gulen.   

The lack of trust between Washington and Ankara grew after Turkey started an air and ground offensive in Afrin, Syria against a Kurdish group known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG. Turkey considers the YPG to be a terrorist organization, alleging it is an extension of a Kurdish group fighting for autonomy in Turkey for decades. 

The U.S. denies those connections and sees the YPG as a key ally in the battle against Islamic State militants.

“We are urging them [Turkish authorities] to show restraint in their operations in Afrin, and to show restraint further along the line across the border in northern Syria,” said a senior State Department official. 

“We can work with them to address their legitimate security concerns while, at the same time, minimizing civilian casualties and above all else, keeping everything focused on the defeat ISIS fight, which is not over,” he added, using the acronym of the Islamic State militants.

In Amman, Tillerson will meet with the Jordanian leadership on the conclusion of a new memorandum of understanding on bilateral assistance, and discuss key regional issues, such as the ongoing crisis in Syria and Jordan’s support for Middle East peace.

In Beirut, he will meet with Lebanese President Michel Aoun, Prime Minister Saad Hariri, and Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri to emphasize U.S. support for the Lebanese people and the Lebanese armed forces.

Building on Vice President Mike Pence’s recent visit to Cairo, Tillerson will meet with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi and Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry to discuss regional security issues such as Libya and Syria, as well as Israeli-Palestinian issues.

The chief U.S. diplomat will also lead a delegation to the ministerial meeting in Kuwait of the 74-member Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. He will also participate in the Iraq Reconstruction Conference, which is the first since Islamic State was defeated in Raqqa, Syria and Iraq declared some of its own territory liberated.

The three-day Iraq Reconstruction Conference will showcase private sector investment opportunities and international support for Iraq.
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Politicians and public figures suspected of buying property with corrupt money will be forced to explain their wealth, or face the seizure of their assets under new legislation that has come into force in Britain this month. As Henry Ridgwell reports from London, the so-called Unexplained Wealth Orders have been welcomed by activists, who say the British capital is at the center of a global web of corrupt and embezzled money.
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When two people see things the same way, it is often said that they are “operating on the same wavelength.” That concept recently got a scientific stamp of approval when researchers at the University of Cambridge found that adults’ and infants’ brainwaves synchronize when they look at each other’s eyes while singing a nursery rhyme. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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Turkey and Russia’s presidents have reportedly agreed to meet with their Iranian counterpart in Istanbul in the near future.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke Thursday amid growing tensions between the countries over Syria.The two also agreed to increase coordination between their forces in Syria.

The telephone conversation follows a tumultuous few days in Syria.

Saturday, a Russian made missile was blamed by Ankara for the destruction of a Turkish tank and the killing of eight Turkish soldiers in the Syrian Kurdish enclave of Afrin.

The deaths were the worst loss for Turkey since it launched an offensive against the YPG Kurdish militia in Syria nearly three weeks ago.

Also Saturday, a Russian jet was downed by Syrian rebels in Idlib.The rebel group blamed by Russia has close ties to Turkey, and Russian media alluded to Turkish involvement, a charge denied by Ankara.

Erdogan reportedly offered his condolences to Putin for the loss of the Russian pilot. Turkey used its connections with the Syrian rebels to help repatriate the pilot’s body.

The incident likely serves as a painful reminder to Putin of the 2015 shooting down by a Turkish jet of a Russian bomber operating from a Syrian airbase. Then, Putin all but severed relations with Ankara and imposed painful sanctions. Now, Moscow appears publicly ready to accept Ankara’s denials of responsibility.

Russia ‘unhappy’

But since Monday, Russia has prevented Turkish warplanes supporting ground forces fighting in Afrin from entering Syria airspace.

“Russia is unhappy and concerned,” noted International Relations Professor Huseyin Bagci of Ankara’s Middle East Technical University, “Russia and Turkey have developed certain relations, but Turkey is much more dependent on Russia. Turkey can’t operate in Syrian airspace without Russia.”

The scale of the Turkish operation and Ankara’s objectives in Syria are also reportedly adding to Moscow’s concern.

Addressing supporters Thursday, Erdogan further stoked concerns over the Afrin operation.

“Those who thought we’ve forgotten all about these lands [Syria] after withdrawing in tears a century ago better realize now they are wrong about Turkey,” he said.

Erdogan also lashed out at foreign powers, including Moscow, for attempting to keep Turkey out of Syria.

Observers suggest Moscow is also uneasy about Turkish reliance on elements of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in the Afrin operation.

Political columnist Semih Idiz, of Al Monitor website argued that Moscow’s concern “is more about the FSA” and some of its elements that are fighting with Turkey.

“They are made up of groups that Russia is bombing,” he added. “That is a potential weak spot in the [Russian-Turkish] relationship. Sooner or later this will surface.”

Ankara and Moscow remain at loggerheads about which Syrian groups can be considered terrorists.

Moscow has tempered its criticism of Ankara. “Both Moscow and Ankara try to maintain the cooperation and are not interested in any kind of frictions which can provoke a break,” noted Zaur Gasimov, an Istanbul-based specialist on Russian-Turkish relations at the Max Weber Foundation.

In its attempts with Tehran to negotiate a solution to the Syrian civil war, Moscow considers Ankara’s strong ties with some Syrian rebel groups important. But experts note key Syrian opposition groups, many with links to Ankara, boycotted the Russian-hosted Sochi meeting in January, likely adding to Moscow’s unease.

Severing alliances

Russia’s deepening relationship with Turkey in the past year potentially offers a bigger prize: the strategic goal of drawing Ankara away from the United States and NATO.

“Turkey and Russia have finally found each other after 300 years separation due to Western-incited wars,” Erdogan’s chief aide, Yigit Bulut, declared on a TV show this week.”Turkey no longer needs the West when Russia and China are taking Turkey’s side.”

A Western diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity said there are deep concerns Erdogan wants to re-orientate Turkey towards Moscow.

Putin is well aware Turkish-US relations are at crisis point over Washington’s support of the YPG in its fight against Islamic State. Erdogan has repeatedly threatened to extend the Syrian offensive to the town of Manbij, where U.S. forces are deployed with the YPG.

Gasimov said Moscow “is about to elaborate a new strategy for Syria.” But for now, he said it is intensively observing the dynamics in the region and in Syria, particularly American-Turkish relations “with regard to the movements of the Turkish troops in Afrin and the plans related to Manbij.”
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