Новини

In the past four years, Russia’s $1.7 trillion economy has been in the world’s top 20. But in 2018, it has been plagued with problems stemming from under-investment, broadening state ownership of enterprise and Western sanctions over the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Now, rising value added tax and interest rates are triggering inflation warnings. VOA’s Pete Cobus reports from Moscow on how those warnings affect Muscovites preparing for their lavish Christmas and New Year’s holiday celebrations.
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British divers who rescued young soccer players trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand are among those being recognized in Britain’s New Year’s Honors List, along with 1960s model Twiggy and Monty Python star Michael Palin.

Twiggy, a model who shot to stardom during the Beatles era, will become a Dame — the female equivalent of a knight — while Palin, whose second career has seen him become an acclaimed travel documentary maker, receives a knighthood.

Jim Carter, who played the acerbic Mr. Carson in “Downton Abbey,” was also recognized, as was filmmaker Christopher Nolan, director of “Inception” and “Dunkirk,” and best-selling author Philip Pullman, creator of the Dark Materials trilogy.

The list released Friday also named 43 people who responded quickly to the extremist attacks in Manchester and London in 2017.

The honors process starts with nominations from the public, which are winnowed down by committees and sent to the prime minister before the various honors are bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II or senior royals next year.

The 92-year-old monarch has increasingly called on her children and grandchildren to hand out the coveted awards.

Divers

Divers Joshua Bratchley, Lance Corporal Connor Roe and Vernon Unsworth will be made Members of the Order of the British Empire for their roles in the risky Thai cave rescue last summer.

Four other British cave divers will receive civilian gallantry awards for their roles in the thrilling rescue of 12 boys and their coach, who were trapped in the cave for more than two weeks.

Richard Stanton and John Volanthen, the first to reach the stranded children and their coach, have been awarded the George Medal, while Christopher Jewell and Jason Mallinson received the Queen’s Gallantry Medal.

Twiggy​

Twiggy, whose modeling career lasted for decades, burst on the London Mod scene as one of the original “It” girls. She earned worldwide fame by 17 and went on to a career in theater and films.

“It’s wonderful, but it makes me giggle,” said Twiggy, 69, whose real name is Lesley Lawson. “The hardest thing has been keeping it a secret.”

Michael Palin

Palin’s knighthood recognizes his contribution to travel, culture and geography. He said the news had not sunk in yet but noted “I have been a knight before, in Python films. I have been several knights, including Sir Galahad.”

“I don’t think it will (sink in) until I see the envelopes addressing me as Sir Michael Palin,” said the 75-year-old. 

 
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Italy’s foreign minister, Enzo Moavero Milanesi, will be visiting Washington from Jan. 3-4, meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the State Department and with national security adviser John Bolton at the White House

Italy’s foreign minister, Enzo Moavero Milanesi, will be visiting Washington in early January, meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the State Department and with national security adviser John Bolton at the White House. 

Italy’s Foreign Ministry said Friday that topics for the Jan. 3-4 meetings include global security, the migrant situation in the Mediterranean Sea, efforts to stabilize Libya, peace efforts in the Middle East, economic and social growth in Africa and trans-Atlantic political, economic and commercial ties. 

The ministry said “Italy intends to further intensity its relations with the United States,” which have been enhanced by nearly two centuries of an Italian-American community “that enlivens American life with its cultural, entrepreneurial and political dynamism.”
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In China, 2018 has been a year that rights defenders worldwide say was extremely repressive, particularly when it comes to religious persecution.

China’s communist party leadership has strongly defended its actions amid growing calls that its actions may constitute crimes against humanity.

Those actions include the internment of hundreds of thousands – perhaps more than a million – Muslims in Xinjiang, the demolition and shuttering of Christian churches nationwide and the systemic crackdown on dissidents.

“2018 has been a year of human rights disasters in China, where all walks of people have paid a dear price over rights abuses. In the past year, China has systemically enforced the most audacious ever persecution policies,” said Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the exile Germany-headquartered World Uighur Congress.

After months of denying their existence, China admitted that the camps do exist and launched a global propaganda campaign defending its interment of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in the western region of Xinjiang.

Beijing has yet to confirm how many have been detained and calls the “vocational centers” a necessary part of their fight against terrorism and religious extremism. The reality, rights advocates argue, is that Muslim minorities are being detained and made to work overtime and without pay in factories for so-called job training.

China is also reportedly planning Xinjiang-style “re-education” camps in Ningxia  home to the Hui minority Muslims. Such moves highlight the communist party’s drastic efforts to wipe out ethnic Muslims and extend control over religious groups, Raxit said.

Bob Fu, the founder of China Aid, agrees. His group, based in the U.S. state of Texas, is committed to promoting religious freedom in China.

“This is a 21st century concentration camp, like Nazi Germany in 1930s and 1940s, so, the international community should unequivocally condemn and urge the Chinese regime to immediately stop this crime,” he said.

Call for sanctions

Rights advocates have called on governments worldwide to impose sanctions on Chinese officials involved in human rights abuses.

U.S. senators including Marco Rubio have denounced Xinjiang’s internment camps and other alleged abuses as possible crimes against humanity.  In November, Rubio and a group of bipartisan lawmakers introduced legislation to address the situation and urged American policymakers to be clear-eyed about the global implications of China’s domestic repression.

The bipartisan bills urge President Donald Trump’s administration to use measures including economic sanctions to defend Uighurs and other Muslim minorities. If that happens, China has said it will retaliate in proportion.

Intensified persecution

It is not just Muslims who have found themselves caught in the communist party’s crosshairs. China Aid’s Fu said China has also escalated its crackdown on Christian communities.

Authorities have torn down houses of worship and in some places, there is a push to ensure that anyone under the age of 18 cannot attend church or be under the influence of religion. China is officially atheist, but says it allows religious freedom.

In early December, Chinese police arrested Pastor Wang Yi, along with more than 100 members of his Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, Sichuan.

The arrests may have been triggered by his manifesto, titled “Meditation on the Religious War,” in which he condemns the communist party and urges Christians to perform acts of civil disobedience.

“It’s just really the tip of the iceberg of overall religious persecution in China since the president, Xi Jinping, took power,” Fu told CNN recently about the case.

Political dissidents

If convicted, Wang could face a jail term of up to 15 years and he has vowed not to plead guilty or confess unless physically tortured, said Jonathan Liu, a priest with the San Francisco-based Chinese Christian Fellowship of Righteousness.

Liu said the pastor’s detention serves the dual purpose of suppressing Christians and silencing political dissidents in China as Wang is a follower of Calvinism  a branch of Protestantism that emphasizes social justice.

“Deeply affected by Calvinism, he cares for those who are socially disadvantaged or rights defenders. So, his church has formed many fellowships to provide care for those people,” Liu said, “In the eyes of the Chinese government, his church has become a hub for [political] dissidents.”

No prospects for improvement

During the United Nations’ periodic review of its rights record, China defended itself, arguing that criticism was “politically motivated” with UN members deliberately disregarding China’s “remarkable achievements.”

For critics, the outlook for 2019 isn’t promising.

“I can see no prospect that there would be any improvement in the coming year. And in fact, the last year, the most horrible thing is to see that the government is openly and fragrantly acting against the law, in total contempt of the [judicial] system they’ve set up,” Albert Ho, chairman of China Human Rights Concern Group in Hong Kong.

The fact that rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang is still being held incommunicado proves that China has little respect for its own laws, Ho said.

Among more than 300 rights lawyers and activists ensnared in China’s 2015 crackdown, lawyer Wang is the last awaiting trial.

After almost three and a half years of arbitrary detention, Wang was finally put on trial in a closed-door hearing in Tianjin on December 26. He reportedly fired his state-appointed lawyer “in the first minute” of his trial,signs of his refusal to cooperate with the authorities.

His wife, Li Wenze, and supporters, as well as western diplomats and journalists, were all barred from attending the hearing, which the court said involved “state secrets,” but rights activists denounced as a blatant violation of China’s own judicial principles.

The court said on its website that a verdict will be announced on a later date. Rights activists argued that Wang would be a blatant case of political persecution shall he be convicted with a maximum 15-year sentence.

Li and three other wives of lawyer victims who have been carrying out a long and loud campaign to secure Wang’s release as well as others, recently shaved their hair to protest his detention for more than three years.

“They (the authorities) keep on shamelessly breaking the law. So today we are using this act of shaving our heads in protest, to show they are persistently and shamelessly breaking the law,” Li said.
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Violence and insecurity have forced more than 28 million children from their homes in 2018, UNICEF said in a news release Thursday.

The U.N. children’s fund said it had responded to more than 300 emergencies to help children caught in many of the 40 armed conflicts raging around the world. 

UNICEF said children had been tortured, raped, used as human shields or suicide bombers, recruited as child soldiers and subjected to a myriad of other atrocities by armed groups. 

While fighting has killed and maimed tens of thousands of children, UNICEF said many more had died from the indirect consequences of conflict, rather than the war itself. For instance, it noted, a child dies of preventable diseases every 10 minutes in Yemen, site of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. 

Caryl Stern, president and chief executive officer of UNICEF USA, told VOA that food insecurity had caused the rate of severe acute malnutrition to rise, with one in four children around the world being malnourished.

“For example, the Central African Republic, there has been such a dramatic resurgence in the fighting there … so two out of three kids are in need of humanitarian assistance in CAR right now,” Stern said. “And 43,000 children below age 5, they are projected to face an extremely elevated risk of death due to severe acute malnutrition.”

UNICEF said escalating fighting and attacks on schools and teachers in Cameroon and in the border regions of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger had deprived millions of children of an education. Similarly, it said, conflict in the Lake Chad Basin is putting the education of 3.5 million children at risk.

Sexual violence

Stern said sexual violence against women and girls was being used as a weapon of war in many conflicts.

“In northeast Nigeria, where you have armed groups, including the Boko Haram, they continue to target girls,” Stern said. “This is including rape. They are forced to become wives of fighters. They are used as human bombs. I mean, what is really going on there is just horrific.”

Stern said children had been abused in all countries and regions of conflict — in Afghanistan, in Myanmar, in Iraq, in Syria, eastern Ukraine and Central America. She said children were being victimized by political leaders who use them as pawns to push a political agenda.

“The border of our own country, the various different things that are happening around the world — Bangladesh and Myanmar. We have to separate the issue of politics from the issues that surround children,” she said.

Stern said children are not migrants. They are not refugees. They are not Somalia’s children or Yemen’s children or Syria’s children or Rohingya children. She said they are children first and foremost, and that there’s nothing political about saving the life of a child.
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The United States will step up research in hypersonic offense and defense weapons, in response to a Russian test of a nuclear-capable hypersonic glider. 

“While the United States has been the world leader in hypersonic system research for many decades, we did not choose to weaponize it,” Defense Department spokeswoman Lt. Col. Michelle Baldanza told VOA. “Those who have decided to weaponize hypersonics are creating a war-fighting asymmetry that we must address.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who oversaw the test Wednesday, said the weapon is impossible to intercept and will ensure Russia’s security for decades to come.

He called it an “excellent New Year’s gift to the nation.”

The weapon, dubbed Avangard, detaches itself from a rocket after being launched and glides back to earth at speeds faster than the speed of sound. 

“The Avangard is invulnerable to intercept by any existing and prospective missile defense means of the potential adversary,” Putin said after the test. 

He said the weapon will become part of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces next year.

The Pentagon has been aware of Russian weapons advances for some time. In March, Putin bragged about having an array of new strategic nuclear weapons that can hit a target anywhere in the world. At the time, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Putin had only “confirmed what the United States government has known all along.” 

Baldanza said the U.S. will now increase focus on hypersonic weapons. “We are pursuing options for weapons delivered from land, sea and air to hold at risk high value, heavily defended and time critical targets at relevant ranges so that we can ensure our ability to dominate the battlefield by 2028.”

The test comes at a time of heightened tensions between Moscow and Washington over the allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, conflict in Ukraine, and the war in Syria.

National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
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A French septuagenarian, armed with a block of foie gras and a couple of bottles of wine, has set sail across the Atlantic in a barrel.

Jean-Jacques Savin, 71, set off from El Hierro in Spain’s Canary Islands and hopes to end his 4,500-kilometer journey to the Caribbean in about three months, relying only on ocean currents and trade winds.

“The weather is great. I’ve got a swell of one meter and I’m moving at 2 to 3 kilometers an hour. … I’ve got favorable winds forecast until Sunday,” Savin told AFP shortly after he set off. 

He described his journey as a “crossing during which man isn’t captain of his ship, but a passenger of the ocean.”

Savin spent several months building his bright orange, barrel-shaped capsule of resin-coated plywood that is strong enough to withstand the constant battering of waves and possible orca attacks.

The barrel, measuring 3 meters long and 2.10 meters across, is equipped with a kitchen area, and a mattress with straps to keep him from being tossed around by rough seas.

He is also carrying a bottle of Sauternes white wine and a block of foie gras for New Year’s Eve, and a bottle of Saint-Émilion red wine for his birthday in January, according to AFP.

Portholes on either side of the barrel and another looking into the water will provide the entertainment. It also has a solar panel that generates energy for communications and GPS positioning.

As he drifts along, Savin will drop markers in the ocean to help oceanographers study ocean currents. Savin will be studied by doctors for effects of solitude in close confinement.

He will also post daily updates including GPS coordinates, tracking the journey on a Facebook page. 

Savin’s adventure, which will cost a little more than $65,000, was funded by French barrel makers and crowdfunding.

Savin hopes to end his journey on a French island, such as Martinique or Guadeloupe. “That would be easier for the paperwork and for bringing the barrel back,” he told AFP.
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The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has suggested that Britain’s departure from the European Union will be costly and could have a damaging effect on public safety.

Cressida Dick told the BBC on Thursday that the adjustment to leaving the EU would be more challenging if there’s no deal in place between Britain and the bloc.

She says U.K. police will have to work out access to vital databases and will need new procedures so people can still be quickly arrested and extradited despite Brexit. Dick says that would be “very difficult to do in short-term” if Britain has no transition deal.

The commissioner hopes Britain will have systems like the ones in place now to facilitate fighting crime.

Prime Minister Theresa May has agreed upon a Brexit deal with EU leaders but many British lawmakers don’t like it.

 
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British officials say nine migrants have been detained on a beach in southeastern England after crossing the English Channel in a small inflatable boat.

The Home Office said Thursday the group comprises five men, one woman, two boys and a girl.

They were intercepted in the English coastal county of Kent by the local lifeboat station.

Manager Matt Crittenden says the inflatable had a very small 10-horsepower engine.

A further rescue operation was also underway after up to eight people were believed to have been spotted on an inflatable vessel near another English coast.

This latest attempt to enter England comes after at least 43 migrants, tried to cross the English Channel on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

There has been a surge in small boat crossings recently.

 
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Russia has successfully conducted its final test of a hypersonic glider capable of carrying nuclear warheads, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.

Putin, who oversaw the test Wednesday, said the weapon is impossible to intercept and will ensure Russia’s security for decades to come.

He called it an “excellent New Year’s gift to the nation.”

The weapon, dubbed Avangard, detaches itself from a rocket after being launched and glides back to Earth at speeds faster than the speed of sound.

On Wednesday, the Avangard was launched from the Dombarovskiy missile base in the southern Ural Mountains. Putin said it hit its designated target at a shooting range 6,000 kilometers away.

“The Avangard is invulnerable to intercept by any existing and prospective missile defense means of the potential adversary,” Putin said after the test.

He said the weapon will become part of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces next year.

The Pentagon is also working on hypersonic weapons, but U.S. officials have warned they lag behind Russia.

The test comes at a time of heightened tensions between Moscow and Washington over allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, conflict in Ukraine and the war in Syria.
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Four international media organizations have called on the Albanian government to drop two draft laws on state regulation and compulsory registration of online media to fight fake news.

In a letter sent Wednesday to Prime Minister Edi Rama and Justice Minister Etilda Gjonaj, the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, the European Federation of Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and PEN International asked them to withdraw the legislation, involve journalists and seek for international assistance to draw up new laws.

They said that in democratic countries “online media are self-regulated.”

In October, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe also expressed concern about a new registration system for media websites in Albania.

Albania expects to launch full membership negotiations with European Union next year.

 
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