Новини

Poland’s ruling party leader has pledged more social benefits for families with children and for the elderly as he opened the right-wing party’s campaign ahead of key elections this year.

Speaking at a party convention Saturday, Jaroslaw Kaczynski announced an upgrade to the generous social program of his Law and Justice party, a policy that has kept the party on top of the political polls since it won power in 2015.

But opinion polls show the party could lose to a united opposition in the European Parliament election in May and in a vote for Poland’s national parliament in the fall. 

Kaczynski, Poland’s most powerful politician, is also facing recent allegations of soliciting a bribe and unlawful participation in business negotiations.

He urged supporters to rally for the party ahead of the elections. His speech drew applause and chants of “Jaroslaw, Jaroslaw!” from party members.

But it also drew criticism from the opposition and economists about the high cost of his promises, at a time when Poland’s health care and education systems remain strapped.

Kaczynski promised to expand family benefits to cover every child, abolish taxes for young employees and raise payouts for retirees.He promised to restore bus connections among small towns and villages that were canceled years ago as unprofitable.

He said the decisions aim to improve “the quality of life, an increase in our freedom and equality” as Poland tries to catch up with richer Western Europe.

Prime Minister Premier Mateusz Morawiecki estimated the costs of the program at up to 40 billion zlotys (9 billion euros) a year, but said he knows how to finance it.
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Iceland’s whaling industry will be allowed to keep hunting whales for at least another five years, killing up to 2,130 baleen whales under a new quota issued by the government.

The five-year whaling policy was up for renewal when Fisheries Minister Kristjan Juliusson announced this week an annual quota of 209 fin whales and 217 minke whales for the next five years.

While many Icelanders support whale hunting, a growing number of businessmen and politicians are against it because of to the North Atlantic island nation’s dependence on tourism.

Whaling vs. tourism

Whaling, they say, is bad for business and poses a threat to the country’s reputation and the expanding international tourism that has become a mainstay of Iceland’s national economy.

The Icelandic Travel Industry Association issued a statement Friday saying the government was damaging the nation’s “great interests” and the country’s reputation to benefit a small whaling sector that is struggling to sell its products.

“Their market for whale meat is Japan, Norway and the Republic of Palau,” the tourism statement said. “Our market is the entire globe.”

Iceland’s Statistics Agency says tourism accounts for 8.6 percent of Iceland’s economic production. In 2016, tourism produced more revenue than Iceland’s fishing industry for the first time.

Quota never filled 

Iceland has four harpoon-equipped vessels, owned by three shipping companies reported to be running them at a loss or small profit. Last year, the industry killed five minke whales and 145 fin whales, according to the Directorate of Fisheries.

Since commercial whale hunting resumed in Iceland in 2006, whaling companies have never killed their full quota. As a result, it’s considered unlikely that all 2,130 whales will be killed under this policy.

The International Whaling Commission imposed a ban on commercial whaling in the 1980s because of dwindling stocks. Japan in December said it was pulling out of the IWC because of its disagreement with that policy. Iceland is still a member of the IWC.
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On the third day of an unprecedented Vatican summit on clerical sexual abuse, the head of the church in Germany, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, said there was clear evidence that files on abuse were manipulated or had been tampered with.

Marx said the church obscured sexual abuse cases and an African nun told the gathering of world bishops to acknowledge the hypocrisy and complacency that had brought it to this disgraceful and scandalous place.

Marx said there was clear evidence that files on abuse were manipulated or had been tampered with.

After bishops spent two days reflecting on the issues of responsibility and accountability, Cardinal Marx used his speech to call for more “traceability and transparency.” 

“Files that could have documented the terrible deeds and named those responsible were destroyed, or not even created. Instead of the perpetrators, the victims were regulated and silence imposed on them,” he said. “The stipulated procedures and processes for the prosecution of offenses were deliberately not complied with, but instead canceled or overridden. The rights of victims were effectively trampled underfoot, and left to the whims of individuals.”

Marx added, “A full-functional church administration is an important building block in the fight against abuse and in dealing with abuse.”

He called for limiting pontifical secrecy in cases of abuse, releasing more statistics and publishing judicial procedures.

In an earlier speech to the assembled church leaders in the Vatican’s synod hall, a prominent Nigerian nun, Sister Veronica Openibo, said the church’s focus “must not be on fear or disgrace” but rather on its mission “to serve with integrity and justice.”

She said that at the present time the church is in “a state of crisis and shame.”

“We must acknowledge that our mediocrity, hypocrisy and complacency have brought us to this disgraceful and scandalous place we find ourselves as a church,” she said.

She spoke of all the atrocities that have been committed by members of the church and urged transparency saying that the church must no longer hide such events out of fear of making mistakes.

“Too often we want to keep silent until the storm has passed. This storm will not pass by. Our credibility as a church is at stake,” Openibo said.

Abuse survivors and demonstrators, meanwhile, held a demonstration in Rome calling for an end to the silence of the Vatican.

Pope Francis, who has come under intense pressure over the failure to deal with increasing cases of clerical sexual abuse, will close the summit on Sunday with a mass attended by all participants and a final speech.
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The attorney for Maria Butina, the Russian women whom U.S. federal prosecutors have charged with illegal foreign lobbying, says her passport has been handed over to U.S. immigration officials to expedite her anticipated deportation to Russia.

In an interview with Russia’s state run TASS news agency, defense attorney Robert Driscoll said he hopes the U.S. judge hearing Butina’s case will announce a verdict and sentencing date within two to six weeks of her next hearing, which is scheduled for February 26.

“Our hope would be that she’ll receive a sentence that will be equivalent to the time already served and that she will be released and deported soon after that,” Driscoll is quoted as telling TASS reporters.

Even if Butina receives a time-served sentence, which would trigger her immediate release, Driscoll said he would still need to negotiate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to arrange for the deportation of a convicted felon.

According to Butina’s plea bargain with prosecutors, U.S. officials have the right to keep her in custody until she’s done cooperating.

“We think she is done with cooperation now, but we need to make sure the government agrees with that,” said Driscoll. “It depends on how long the government says they need, wherever there are any other cases that she needs to testify about.

“I’ve been talking to them in advance, obviously, trying to make that transition as smooth as possible so that we don’t have her in ICE detention for any significant length of time,” Driscoll said, adding that he’s hopeful her transition from her Virginia jail to Russia can happen in less than a week.

“We’re working that out,” he said. “ICE already has her [Butina’s] passport. We’re trying to make sure this happens as quickly as possible,” he continued.

Butina, who in December pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered Russian agent, had been held in solitary confinement for months. Driscoll also told interviewers that, after her December plea, she was moved to a minimum-security cell and has since had access to a gym, meals with other female inmates, a prison chapel, and gets to watch television shows once or twice a week.

In January, Butina’s family told VOA that they were eagerly awaiting her return to her hometown of Barnaul, Siberia.

Driscoll said he’s not sure whether Butina would return to Russia via commercial or government flight.

Pete Cobus is VOA’s acting Moscow correspondent.

 
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The legal loopholes that have allowed Catholic bishops to escape sanction when they cover up clergy sex abuse cases may be closing.

Two U.S. cardinals have confirmed that the Vatican is working on a “clarification” to a 2016 law that was supposed to hold bishops and religious superiors accountable when they fail to protect their flocks, but it never really did.

Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston told a press conference Friday during Pope Francis’ sex abuse prevention summit that he had been guaranteed that the new document would “come out very soon.” Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich said the document would standardize procedures within the various Vatican offices to investigate bishops and order their removal.

The new document would further clarify the law Francis issued in 2016, entitled “As a Loving Mother,” which he passed instead of creating a special tribunal section inside the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to handle abuse of office cases.

Cupich said the law had been applied in “recent cases,” but the Vatican has provided no information about how it has been implemented or how many bishops have been sanctioned as a result of it.

Bishops, religious superiors got a pass

For decades, the Vatican has been criticized by abuse victims and their advocates for having turned a blind eye to the bishops and religious superiors who failed to punish sexual predators in the priesthood. While the Vatican began cracking down on the abusers themselves under Pope Benedict XVI, the superiors who enabled the crimes and allowed abusers to continue raping children largely got a pass.

Acting on a proposal from his sex abuse advisory commission, Francis and his group of cardinal advisers agreed in 2015 to create a tribunal section within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to prosecute bishops and superiors when they botched cases. A press statement issued at the time said the pope had pledged to provide the new office with adequate staffing and resources.

But the tribunal posed a host of legal and bureaucratic issues and ran into opposition from bishops and the Vatican bureaucracy. The congregation, which handles sex abuse cases, apparently was never consulted about the feasibility of creating such a tribunal before it was announced to the press to great fanfare.

A year later, Francis issued “As a Loving Mother” that made no mention of a tribunal but merely reminded the four Vatican offices that handle bishop issues that they were also responsible for investigating and punishing negligence cases. It made clear that a negligent act or omission on handling an abuse allegation was grounds for dismissal.

​Lack of tribunal good, prosecutor says

The Vatican’s longtime sex crimes prosecutor, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, told reporters Friday that under the 2016 law, it was actually easier to remove a negligent bishop than if he were subject to a canonical trial in a tribunal where the bishop’s intent would have to be proved.

The 2016 law “looks at the objective state of the (bishops’) incapacity” to govern, whereas a tribunal would have required proof that an actual law had been broken, Scicluna said. The 2016 legislation benefits those who are claiming negligence by a bishop because “they only have to denounce an objective fact: that nothing was done,” Scicluna said.

O’Malley, who heads a commission that first proposed the tribunal, said the issue of holding bishops accountable was “uppermost in our minds right now.”

“Right now the Holy See is working on, preparing a clarification of the implementation that will come out very soon, I am guaranteed,” he said.

Investigation blueprint

Cupich, for his part, dedicated his speech to Francis’ abuse summit to how such investigations against bishops might be reported to the Vatican and then carried out once the Vatican has authorized an investigation. His proposal called for the metropolitan bishop, who has authority over other bishops in a particular geographic region, to conduct the investigation, using the help of lay experts.

“What I present here is a framework for constructing new legal structures of accountability in the church,” Cupich said, in a speech that implied that such structures are very much in the works at the Holy See.

Accountability, fairness

Speakers at Francis’ summit have proposed other changes to canon law as well to ensure accountability and fairness to victims and accused priests alike.

Linda Ghisoni, an Italian canon lawyer and undersecretary at the Vatican’s laity office, said the Holy See should change its laws concerning the “pontifical secret,” the confidentiality regulations that govern how sex abuse cases are handled internally.

Victims for years have denounced the high level of secrecy, which often prevents them from learning the outcomes or progress of their cases. Accused priests, too, have complained how they are kept in the dark about the details of their cases.

Ghisoni told the summit that a degree of confidentiality must be retained to guarantee the dignity and reputations of all involved. But she said the secrecy regulations “should allow for the development of a climate of greater transparency and trust.”
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Spain’s long-running controversy over the legacy of its 20th century leader, the fascist dictator General Francisco Franco, is entering a new phase as the government presses ahead with plans to move his remains from a mausoleum in the hills outside Madrid.

The issue has long been the cause of anguish and shame for those who see Franco as a murderous dictator whose crimes have never truly been acknowledged. The mausoleum is located in Spain’s vast Valley of the Fallen, which Franco commissioned in 1940, purportedly as a monument to reconciliation after the Spanish civil war which his Nationalist forces won at a cost of half a million lives.

The exhumation effort comes as Spain faces a constitutional crisis sparked by the Catalonia region’s efforts to break away from Spain. During the civil war in the 1930s, the area was a key stronghold for Republicans who fought against Franco until his Nationalists eventually beat them. Franco became Spain’s leader until his death in 1975. Calls to break away have been fueled by historical resentment over rule from Madrid.

Ministers have given Franco’s family until the end of the month to decide where to move the remains. 

Those who see Franco as a Spanish hero — among them retired General Juan Chicharro Ortega, president of the Francisco Franco Foundation — oppose any such relocation.

“Here in Spain there are millions of Spaniards who still admire Franco and remember what he did for Spain, especially because he won [against] Communism. Many people are very grateful to him. We don’t see any other possibility [than] that his remains remain where he is now,” Ortega told VOA.

Supporters of the exhumation argue that the dictator’s remains have no place in the Valley of the Fallen, which is supposed to honor victims on all sides of the Spanish civil war.

Should the exhumation go ahead, Franco’s relatives want his remains interred in the Cathedral of Almudena in central Madrid, where other family members are buried. The government has ruled out that location, fearing it would become a place of pilgrimage for Franco admirers in the heart of the capital. Gonzalo Berger, a historian at the Open University of Catalonia, says such a move would only exacerbate divisions.

“It would be easy to visit those remains and the worship of him would be passed to the center of Madrid, with absolutely undesirable consequences. The absolute opposite of what is intended — it would be an absolute disaster,” Berger said. He also said it will take more than exhumation for Spaniards to have closure over the past.

“At the same time, you have to deploy policies to society as a whole. It is necessary somehow to solve the problem of the disappeared, the people who are in the mass graves, the recognition of the anti-fascist combatants or those who defended the republic.”

For decades, Spain tried to forget the Franco dictatorship. Now the battle over his legacy could play into the country’s profound political crisis.
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Accountability was the focus of the second day of a Vatican summit on sexual abuse involving members of the Catholic Church. Cardinals spoke of the need to establish robust laws and structures to ensure accountability and to involve lay experts in the process for transparency.

Cardinals attending the summit spoke of the importance of the “witness, courage and candor of victim survivors” to keep the church’s leadership focused on learning “the seriousness of child abuse, the damage that it has done, the havoc it has wreaked on people’s lives.”

At a briefing following the morning session, American Cardinal Sean O’Malley said there is nothing more urgent for the church to do than come together to address what he said is the most important part of its mission at this moment in history — “the protection of children and to redress the crimes, the suffering, the betrayals that have been inflicted on so many children and vulnerable adults.”

In addressing the gathering, Cardinal Oswald Gracias of India spoke first of his meeting with a group of victims earlier this week and said it had left a deep impression on him.

“I was numbed and could not speak,” he said. “I could sense the anger, frustration, hurt, helplessness and bitterness that they felt.”

The cardinal said bishops needed to repent and seek pardon together because they had failed in addressing sexual abuse in the church. He said no bishop could shy away from his responsibility by saying things were different in his part of the world because the problem exists everywhere.

“We are jointly responsible,” he said. “All of us in this synod hall this morning are jointly responsible to tackle the problem of sexual abuse of minors by clerics all over the world. We as a body are called to examine ourselves.”

Cardinal Blase Cupich from the United States focused on the need to design “specific institutional and legal structures for the purpose of creating genuine accountability in cases related to the misconduct of bishops and religious superiors and their mishandling of cases of child abuse.”

He stressed the importance of involving lay persons and experts in all efforts.

“It is the witness of the laity,” he said, “especially mothers and fathers with great love for the church, who have pointed out movingly and forcefully how gravely incompatible the commission, cover-up, and toleration of clergy sexual abuse is with the very meaning and essence of the Church.”

Outcome in doubt

Many doubt concrete results will emerge from the summit. Speaking in Rome Tuesday, Anne Barrett Doyle of the group Bishop Accountability said much is at stake with grieving and disillusioned Catholics all over the world as thousands have been sexually abused by clergy for decades. She said the meeting must produce a solution.

The Vatican conference ends Sunday when Pope Francis delivers a speech and holds a Mass with all participants.
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A Moscow court on Friday extended the detention for the American arrested at the end of December for alleged spying.

Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, was detained in a Moscow hotel at the end of December. His arrest raised speculation that he could be swapped for one of the Russians being held in the United States. Whelan’s lawyer said his client had been handed a flash-drive with classified information that he had been unaware of.

The court in Moscow ruled to keep Whelan, who arrived in court under escorted by a masked man, behind bars for another three months pending the investigation.

Whelan has not been formally charged yet but spying charges in Russia carry up to 20 years in prison.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Embassy complained that Russian authorities are not letting Whelan sign and hand over a waiver that would allow consular officials to release more details about his case.

The embassy said it is the first time that the Russian Investigative Committee is not allowing a U.S. national in a Russian jail to pass on a signed privacy waiver form.

“Why is this case any different? Consular access without being able to do true consular support is not real access,” U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Andrea Kalan said on Twitter.

 
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Turkish police raided the homes of hundreds of military personnel Friday in connection with the July 2016 failed coup.

The prosecutor’s office has charged the service members with links to the network of U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Ankara has put the blame for the coup attempt on supporters of Gulen, whose Hizmet movement has an influential presence in Turkish society, including the media, police and judiciary.

Turkey is facing growing accusations the ongoing crackdown is more about stifling dissent.

This week, Turkey jailed several journalists and academics, and a philanthropist charged with sedition, which carries life imprisonment.

The U.S.-based Human Right Watch condemned Turkey in a statement Friday, while European parliamentarians proposed a motion this week for the suspension of Turkey’s EU membership bid.

Gulen, a former ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has denied allegations that he was behind the 2016 coup attempt, in which about 250 people were killed.
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The day began with an African woman telling an extraordinary gathering of Catholic leaders that her priestly rapist forced her to have three abortions over a dozen years after he started violating her at age 15. It ended with a Colombian cardinal warning them they could all face prison if they let such crimes go unpunished.

In between, Pope Francis began charting a new course for the Catholic Church to confront clergy sexual abuse and cover-up, a scandal that has consumed his papacy and threatens the credibility of the Catholic hierarchy at large.

Opening a first-ever Vatican summit on preventing abuse, Francis warned 190 bishops and religious superiors on Thursday that their flocks were demanding concrete action, not just words, to punish predator priests and keep children safe. He offered them 21 proposals to consider going forward, some of them obvious and easy to adopt, others requiring new laws.

But his main point in summoning the Catholic hierarchy to the Vatican for a four-day tutorial was to impress upon them that clergy sex abuse is not confined to the United States or Ireland, but is a global scourge that requires a concerted, global response.

“Listen to the cry of the young, who want justice,” Francis told the gathering. “The holy people of God are watching and expect not just simple and obvious condemnations, but efficient and concrete measures to be established.”

More than 30 years after the scandal first erupted in Ireland and Australia, and 20 years after it hit the U.S., bishops and Catholic officials in many parts of Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia still either deny that clergy sex abuse exists in their regions or play down the problem.

Francis, the first Latin American pope, called the summit after he himself botched a well-known sex abuse cover-up case in Chile last year and the scandal reignited in the U.S.

‘Murderers of the soul’

The tone for the high stakes summit was set at the start, with victims from five continents — Europe, Africa, Asia, South America and North America — telling the bishops of the trauma of their abuse and the additional pain the church’s indifference caused them.

“You are the physicians of the soul and yet, with rare exceptions, you have been transformed — in some cases — into murderers of the soul, into murderers of the faith,” Chilean survivor Juan Carlos Cruz told the bishops in his videotaped testimony.

Other survivors were not identified, including the woman from Africa who said she was so young and trusting when her priest started raping her that she didn’t even know she was being abused.

“He gave me everything I wanted when I accepted to have sex; otherwise he would beat me,” she told the bishops. “I got pregnant three times and he made me have an abortion three times, quite simply because he did not want to use condoms or contraceptives.”

Manila Cardinal Luis Tagle choked up as he responded to their testimony.

In a moving meditation that followed the video testimony, Tagle told his brother bishops that the wounds they had inflicted on the faithful through their negligence and indifference to the sufferings of their flock recalled the wounds of Christ on the cross.

He demanded bishops and superiors no longer turn a blind eye to the harm caused by clergy who rape and molest the young.

“Our lack of response to the suffering of victims, yes even to the point of rejecting them and covering up the scandal to protect perpetrators and the institution, has injured our people,” Tagle said. The result, he said, had left a “deep wound in our relationship with those we are sent to serve.”

Lesson on investigating abuse

After he offered the bishops a vision of what a bishop should be, the Vatican’s onetime sex crimes prosecutor told them what a bishop should do. Archbishop Charles Scicluna delivered a step-by-step lesson Thursday on how to conduct an abuse investigation under the church’s canon law, repeatedly citing the example of Pope Benedict XVI, who turned the Vatican around on the issue two decades ago.

Calling for a conversion from a culture of silence to a “culture of disclosure,” Scicluna told bishops they should cooperate with civil law enforcement investigations and announce decisions about predators to their communities once cases have been decided.

He said victims had the right to seek damages from the church and that bishops should consider using lay experts to help guide them during abuse investigations.

The people of God “should come to know us as friends of their safety and that of their children and youth,” he said. “We will protect them at all cost. We will lay down our lives for the flocks entrusted to us.”

Finally, Scicluna warned them that it was a “grave sin” to withhold information from the Vatican about candidates for bishops — a reference to the recent scandal of the now-defrocked former American cardinal, Theodore McCarrick. It was apparently an open secret in some church circles that McCarrick slept with young seminarians. He was defrocked last week by Francis after a Vatican trial found credible reports that he abused minors as well as adults.

21 proposals

Francis, for his part, offered a path of reform going forward, handing out the 21 proposals for the church to consider.

He called for specific protocols to handle accusations against bishops, in yet another reference to the McCarrick scandal. He suggested protocols to govern the transfers of seminarians or priests to prevent predators from moving freely to unsuspecting communities.

One idea called for bolstering child protection laws in some countries by raising the minimum age for marriage to 16; another suggested a basic handbook showing bishops how to investigate cases.

In the final speech of the day, Colombian Cardinal Ruben Salazar Gomez warned his brother bishops that they could face not only canonical sanctions but also imprisonment for a cover-up if they failed to properly deal with allegations.

Abuse and cover-up, he said, “is the distortion of the meaning of ministry, which converts it into a means to impose force, to violate the conscience and the bodies of the weakest.”

Demonstrations

Abuse survivors have turned out in droves in Rome to demand accountability and transparency from church leaders and assert that the time of sex abuse cover-ups is over.

“The question is this: Why should the church be allowed to handle the pedophile question? The question of pedophilia is not a question of religion, it is [a question of] crime,” Francesco Zanardi, head of the main victims advocacy group in Italy Rete L’Abuso, or Abuse Network, told a news conference in the Italian parliament.

Hours before the Vatican summit opened, activists in Poland pulled down a statue of a priest accused of sexually abusing minors. They said the stunt was to protest the failure of the Polish Catholic Church in resolving the problem of clergy sex abuse.

Video showed three men attaching a rope around the statue of the late Monsignor Henryk Jankowski in the northern city of Gdansk and pulling it to the ground in the dark. They then placed children’s underwear in one of the statue’s hands and a white lace church vestment worn by altar boys on the statue’s body. Jankowski is accused of molesting boys.

The private broadcaster TVN24 reported the three men were arrested.

Jankowski, who died in 2010, rose to prominence in the 1980s through his support for the pro-democracy Solidarity movement against Poland’s communist regime. World leaders including President George H.W. Bush and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited his church to recognize his anti-communist activity.
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Thousands of Slovaks rallied to mark the first anniversary of the killing of an investigative reporter and his fiancee on Thursday and to protest what they see as a lack of government action against the sleaze he wrote about.

Crowds gathered in the capital and in dozens of towns at rallies organized by “For a Decent Slovakia” — a group of students and NGOs, who said in a statement that they demanded a proper investigation of the murders and a trustworthy government.

“If we want to move forward, we have to know the names of those who ordered this monstrous murder,” organizers said. There were no official turnout estimates but the crowds were smaller than last year’s string of protests that ousted then prime minister Robert Fico after a decade in power and led to a government shakeup.

The changes disappointed many, however, because no snap elections were held and the same three-party coalition has stayed in power. The next vote is due in 2020.

Fico remains chairman of the ruling Smer party and is seen as driving policy behind the scenes, often launching attacks against the media. “You are the biggest criminals, you have caused this country the biggest damage,” Fico told journalists days before the anniversary.

Journalist Jan Kuciak, 27, was shot along with his fiancee in what prosecutors say was a contract killing.

The last article he worked on looked at Italian businessmen in Slovakia with suspected mafia links. He reported that one of the businessman, who has since been extradited to Italy on drug smuggling charges, had business connections with two Slovaks who later worked in Fico’s office.

Fico has denied any wrongdoing and has also blamed the Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist George Soros for his fall.

Police arrested four people in September, including a woman identified only by her initials AZ, who was charged with ordering the murder. Media have identified her as Alena Zsuzsova. She has denied any wrongdoing.

She was never a subject of any of Kuciak’s reporting but Slovak media have reported that she had business ties to the politically connected businessman Marian Kocner, currently held in custody on charges of forgery.

Months before his murder, Kuciak told the police that Kocner had threatened to start collecting information on him and his family. The police did not press any charges.

Kocner has denied any links to the murder.

More than 400 journalists have signed an open letter, pledging to finish Kuciak’s work and demanding government transparency.

“We learnt there are people in the police, prosecutor’s office and government who do not want to protect journalists, instead protecting those who are the subjects of our stories,” it said.

Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini on Thursday urged Slovaks to come together on the anniversary. “Investigation of the murders is one of this government’s priorities. I wish that the murders did not divide our society anymore.”
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Balloting has started for next month’s general election in Estonia, an online voting pioneer, amid tight protective measures a day after Microsoft warned that hackers linked to Russia had allegedly targeted democratic institutions in Europe.

Kristi Kirsberg, media adviser to Estonia’s electoral committee, said Thursday that the Baltic country — the first in the world to use online balloting for a national election in 2005 — has trained candidates to properly secure their homepages and was closely tracking fake news and disinformation.

Apart from educating candidates on cyberthreats, special attention has been given to protecting political parties’ websites, she said.

Excluding “some minor Facebook postings,” no interference attempts have been reported. Kirsberg said Estonia’s government agencies have set up hotlines to major social media companies like Facebook, who are ready to assist election officials.

“The State Chancellery has helped us to build ties with Facebook, Twitter and Google so that we can quickly inform them in case some kind of disinformation on the election starts to spread,” Kirsberg said. She said that one government official was fully focused on monitoring domestic, Western and Russian news sites as well as social media.

Microsoft said Wednesday that a hacking group identified as Strontium, with alleged links to Russia, had targeted email accounts within think tanks and nonprofit groups in six European countries, not including Estonia, ahead of the EU parliamentary elections in May.

The U.S. tech company urged politicians and authorities to keep in mind that cyberattacks and hacking aren’t limited to election campaigns but have targeted groups dealing with democracy, electoral integrity, and public policy.

Poll leader

Many Estonian experts don’t expect neighboring Russia to meddle with the former Soviet state’s election as Moscow isn’t seen gaining much from such activity.

Estonia’s governing Center Party, which is led by Prime Minister Juri Ratas and caters to the country’s large ethnic-Russian minority, is leading in polls and Ratas is expected to have good chances of forming the new Cabinet.

About a third of Estonia’s eligible 958,600 voters are expected to cast ballots online to renew the 101-seat Parliament in the small country of 1.3 million. The election is March 3.

The online voting system is based on Estonians’ solid trust in their government, which has provided over one million compulsory ID cards, complete with a microchip, enabling secure identification on the internet.

Ballots are cast through a government website. Should a person change their mind, they can go back into the site or vote at a traditional polling station to change their vote during the advance voting period until Feb. 27.
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