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Spain’s Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a lower court’s conviction of the husband of Princess Cristina for fraud and tax evasion, though it acquitted him of forgery and reduced his prison sentence by five months.

The court ruled on an appeal that Inaki Urdangarin, King Felipe VI’s brother-in-law, was also guilty of misuse of public funds, abuse of power and influence peddling and should serve a sentence of five years and 10 months.

The lower court, in Palma de Mallorca, convicted Urdangarin in a 2016 trial that captivated Spain as Princess Cristina testified in court. It was the first time a member of Spain’s royal family was put on trial since the monarchy was restored in 1975.

The case centered on accusations that Urdangarin embezzled about 6 million euros ($7 million) in public funds. The court found that Urdangarin and his business partner Diego Torres exploited the duke’s “privileged status” to obtain public contracts related to sports events.

The Supreme Court also upheld the verdict that Princess Cristina benefitted from her husband’s crimes. She was ordered to pay a fine of 136,950 euros ($161,500).

Sources at the Zarzuela royal palace commented after the ruling that the monarchy has “total respect for judicial independence,” the Europa Press news agency reported.

The lower court will now rule on when Urdangarin must enter prison to serve his sentence, though he can still appeal to the Constitutional Court.

Princess Cristina and her husband were stripped of their titles of the Duke and Duchess of Palma after the initial court verdict. The couple moved from Barcelona to Geneva with their four children when the first allegations of wrongdoing emerged in 2012.

 
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The man at the center of a sex-abuse and financial crimes scandal that is tarnishing the academy which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, was Tuesday charged with two counts of rape of a woman in 2011.

Swedish prosecutor Christina Voigt said the evidence “is robust and sufficient for prosecution.”

Jean-Claude Arnault, a well-known figure in Sweden who ran a cultural center, is married to poet and member of the Swedish Academy, Katarina Frostenson. He has denied this and other sex abuse allegations.

In April, the Swedish Academy said an internal investigation into sexual misconduct allegations found that “unacceptable behavior in the form of unwanted intimacy” has taken place within the ranks of the prestigious institution.

Voight didn’t name the victim as is the customary in Sweden.

The secretive 18-member board has in recent months been embroiled in a sex-abuse scandal that investigators concluded was “not generally known.” It has led to the departure of at least six of members of the Academy and tarnished the prize’s reputation.

The academy had commissioned lawyers to investigate sexual misconduct claims from 18 women against Arnault. In April, it had decided to hand over the internal report to relevant judicial authorities.

 
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Spain announced Monday that it will allow a ship carrying 629 migrants to dock in Valencia. The rescue ship Aquarius has been in international waters since picking up the migrants from a smuggler’s vessel off the coast of Libya. Malta and Italy refused to let it dock, saying they cannot cope with more migrants and refugees. It is not clear whether the rescue ship can make the 1,400-kilometer journey to Valencia and what awaits migrants once they disembark in the European Union country.
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The U.S. sanctioned five Russian entities and three individuals Monday, accusing them of malicious cyber activities to provide material and technological support to Moscow’s intelligence service.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the sanctioned entities and individuals “have directly contributed to improving Russia’s cyber and underwater capabilities through their work with “the Russian Federal Security Service “and therefore jeopardize the safety and security of the United States and our allies.”

He said the U.S. “is committed to aggressively targeting any entity or individual working at the direction” of the Russian intelligence service “whose work threatens the United States and will continue to utilize our sanctions authorities … to counter the constantly evolving threats emanating from Russia.”

The sanctions continue what appear to be conflicted messages from Washington about Moscow.

The U.S. has imposed a series of penalties against specific Russian activities. Yet just last week, President Donald Trump suggested that Russia be allowed to rejoin the G-7 group of advanced economies after being pushed out in 2014 for its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Trump has also been discussing the possibility of a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The sanctions announced Monday block access for those blacklisted to any U.S. financial accounts they hold and prohibit Americans from any transactions with them.

The Treasury statement said the five entities and three individuals have engaged in “malign and destabilizing cyber activities,” including intrusions “against the U.S. energy grid to potentially enable future offensive operations” and “global compromises of network infrastructure devices.”

It said the sanctions also target Russia’s underwater capabilities, which it said include tracking undersea communications cables that carry the bulk of the world’s telecommunications data.

The U.S. said one of the entities, Divetechno services, bought underwater equipment and diving services for the intelligence service, including a $1.5 million submersible craft. The three sanctioned individuals all worked for the company.
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A rescue ship run by a European charity is headed to Spain with more than 600 migrants on board after Italy and Malta refused to accept the vessel. Italy’s new government, which campaigned on halting the flow of migrants into the country, is starting to make good on his promises.

The European Union and the United Nations refugee agency had called for a swift end to a political standoff that left 629 migrants on the rescue ship Aquarius drifting at sea. Spain has now offered to take the ship in after Italy and Malta refused.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez ordered authorities to allow the Aquarius to dock in the eastern port of Valencia. Sanchez’s office issued a statement saying “it is our duty to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe and offer a secure port for these people.”

More than 100 unaccompanied minors and a number of pregnant women are on board the Aquarius. Six different rescue operations took place over the weekend off the coast of Libya, coordinated by the Italian coast guard. Medical workers had said food on board the ship was going to run out by Monday night.

Italy’s new deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, had said the country would not allow the ship to dock in any of its ports. Italy asked Malta to provide assistance to Aquarius because it was the nearest available port. But the small island nation’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, refused.

Salvini, who also serves as Italy’s interior minister, has promised to change immigration policies in Italy, saying the new Italian government’s efforts will be aimed at guaranteeing peaceful lives for Africans in Africa and for Italians in their own country.

On a recent visit to the southern port of Pozzallo where many migrants have been arriving, Salvini said Italy is a member of international organizations such as the U.N. and NATO. And so, he asked why is it that in the Mediterranean and in North Africa there is not more concrete intervention to defend security?

More than 600,000 migrants have reached Italy by boat from Africa in the past five years. The new Italian government led by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has made it clear that the EU cannot continue to leave Italy to deal with the migrant crisis on its own.
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Spain says it will allow a rescue ship carrying more than 600 migrants picked up in the Mediterranean to dock in the eastern port of Valencia, after Italy’s new prime minister, who also leads the right-wing League party, ordered Italy’s ports to refuse entry to the rescue ship. The Aquarius rescue ship run by European charity SOS Mediterranee has been drifting in international waters with 629 migrants on board. More from Sabina Castlefranco in Rome.
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The White House is assailing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, saying he “stabbed us in the back” and undermined U.S. President Donald Trump after Trump left the G-7 economic summit early for Singapore.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told Fox News, “There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad-faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door … that’s what bad faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference.”

Navarro added, “To my friends in Canada, that was one of the worst political miscalculations of the Canadian leader in modern Canadian history. All Justin Trudeau had to do was take the win.”

Trump left the Group of Seven summit in Quebec early Saturday to head to Singapore for his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

After Trump left, Trudeau called new U.S. tariffs on aluminum and steel “insulting.”

“We leave and then he pulls this sophomoric political stunt for domestic consideration,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told CNN. “You just don’t behave that way. It’s a betrayal.”

Kudlow said Trump negotiated the communique in “good faith,” and had called at the summit for “no tariffs, free trade.”

But Kudlow said Trump “gets up in a plane and then … Trudeau stabs him.” He said Trump “is not going to let a Canadian prime minister push him around.”

U.S. wouldn’t sign communique

While airborne, Trump ordered U.S. officials to refuse to sign the traditional end-of-summit communique.

“Based on Justin’s false statements at his news conference, and the fact that Canada is charging massive Tariffs to our U.S. farmers, workers, and companies, I have instructed our U.S. reps not to endorse the communique as we look at tariffs on automobiles flooding the U.S. market!” Trump said on Twitter.

“PM Justin Trudeau of Canada acted so meek and mild during our G7 meetings only to give a news conference after I left saying that, ‘US Tariffs were kind of insulting’ and he ‘will not be pushed around.’ Very dishonest & weak. Our Tariffs are in response to his of 270% on dairy!” he added.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel told ARD television that Trump’s withdrawal from the communique through a tweet is “sobering and a bit depressing.”

French President Emmanuel Macron attacked Trump’s stance, saying, “International cooperation cannot be dictated by fits of anger and throwaway remarks.” He called Trump’s refusal to sign the communique a display of “incoherence and inconsistency.”  

Trudeau did not respond to the U.S. attacks, instead declaring the summit a success.

“The historic and important agreement we all reached” at the summit “will help make our economies stronger and people more prosperous, protect our democracies, safeguard our environment, and protect women and girls’ rights around the world. That’s what matters,” Trudeau said.

But foreign minister Chrystia Freeland said, “Canada does not believe that ad hominem attacks are a particularly appropriate or useful way to conduct our relations with other countries.”

Canada refuses to budge

Trudeau closed the annual G-7 summit Saturday in Canada by refusing to budge on positions that place him at odds with Trump, particularly the new steel and aluminum tariffs that have drawn the ire of Canada and the European Union.

He said in closing remarks that Canada will proceed with retaliatory measures on U.S. goods as early as July 1.

“I highlighted directly to the president that Canadians did not take it lightly that the United States has moved forward with significant tariffs,” Trudeau said following the summit. “Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable, but we will also not be pushed around.”

British Prime Minister Theresa May echoed Trudeau, pledging to retaliate for tariffs on EU goods.

“The loss of trade through tariffs undermines competition, reduces productivity, removes the incentive to innovate and ultimately makes everyone poorer,” May said. “And in response, the EU will impose countermeasures.”

U.S. Republican Sen. John McCain, a vocal Trump critic, offered support for the other six world leaders at the Canadian summit.

“To our allies,” McCain tweeted, “bipartisan majorities of Americans remain pro-free trade, pro-globalization & supportive of alliances based on 70 years of shared values. Americans stand with you, even if our president doesn’t.”

Trudeau and May also bucked Trump on another high-profile issue: Russia. Trump suggested Russia rejoin the group after being pushed out in 2014 when it annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Trudeau said he is “not remotely interested” in having Russia rejoin the group.

May added, “We have agreed to stand ready to take further restrictive measures against Russia if necessary.”
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A human chain made of 175,000 people stretched 200 kilometers (124 miles) Sunday in a display to demand an independence vote for the Basque region in northern Spain.

The demonstrators linked hands and stretched their chain from the coastal resort of San Sebastian to the Basque capital of Vitoria.

Some used white scarves as part of the chain while others sang and danced in place.

“We want for our people to have the right to choose what it wants to be,” one demonstrator said.

The president of the Basque parliament said the marchers are an “active and lively people” who want to make decisions in a democratic way.

Pro-independence forces hope their chances for a referendum have gone up since the armed Basque separatist group ETA announced last month it is disbanding after 50 years and more than 800 killings.

Basques already enjoy wide autonomy in northern Spain and parts of southern France. However, some say they will not be satisfied by anything less than full independence.
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A private rescue ship carrying 629 migrants remained Sunday evening on a northward course in the Mediterranean Sea after more than a day of not receiving permission to dock in either Italy or the small island nation of Malta.

Aid group SOS Mediterranee said the passengers on its ship, the Aquarius, included 400 people who were picked up by the Italian navy, the country’s coast guard and private cargo ships and transferred. The rescue ship’s crew itself pulled 229 migrants from the water or from traffickers’ unseaworthy boats Saturday night, including 123 unaccompanied minors and seven pregnant women.

The Aquarius and its passengers were caught up in a crackdown swiftly implemented by the right-wing partner in Italy’s new populist government, which has vowed to stop the country from becoming the `’refugee camp of Europe.”

“Starting today, Italy, too, begins to say NO to the trafficking of human beings, NO to the business of clandestine immigration,” Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the anti-migrant League party, tweeted Sunday.

Salvini and Italian Transportation Minister Danilo Toninelli, who is part of the 5-Star Movement faction in the new government, said in a joint statement Sunday that it was Malta’s responsibility to “open its ports for the hundreds of the rescued on the NGO ship Aquarius.”

“The island can’t continue to turn the other way,” the ministers said. “The Mediterranean is the sea of all the countries that face it, and it [Malta] can’t imagine that Italy will continue to face this giant phenomenon in solitude.”

The Maltese government, however, was not moved. It said in a statement that the Aquarius took on the passengers in waters controlled by Libya and where Italian authorities in Rome coordinate search-and-rescue operations.

The Maltese Rescue Coordination Center “is neither the competent nor the coordinating authority,” the statement said.

SOS Mediterranee spokeswoman Mathilde Auvillain told The Associated Press the ship was `’heading north following instructions received after the rescues and transfers” Saturday night. The Rome-based rescue coordination center gave the instructions.

The aid group said in a statement it had taken “good note” of Salvini’s stance, as reported earlier by Italian media. It added that the Aquarius “is still waiting for definitive instructions regarding the port of safety.”

SOS Mediterranee said Maltese search-and-rescue authorities were contacted by their Italian counterparts “to find the best solution for the well-being and safety” of the people on the ship.

Other migrant boats

Farther west in the Mediterranean, Spain’s maritime rescue service saved 334 migrants and recovered four bodies from boats it intercepted trying to reach Europe over the weekend. The rescue service said its patrol craft reached nine different boats carrying migrants that had left from Africa on Saturday and early Sunday.

One boat found Sunday was carrying four bodies along with 49 migrants. The cause of death was yet to be determined.

To the east, Libya’s coast guard intercepted 152 migrants, including women and children, from two boats stopped in the Mediterranean off the coast of the western Zuwara district Saturday. The migrants were taken to a naval base in Tripoli.

Human rights groups oppose returning rescued migrants to Libya, where many are held in inhumane conditions, poorly fed and often forced to do slave labor.

Libya was plunged into chaos following a 2011 uprising. The lawlessness in Libya has made it a popular place for migrants to try to depart for Europe.

Driven by violent conflicts and extreme poverty, hundreds of thousands of migrants have reached southern Europe in recent years by crossing the Mediterranean in smugglers’ boats that often are unseaworthy.

The United Nations says at least 785 migrants have died crossing the sea this year.
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Britain’s biggest companies will from 2020 be legally required to publish the gap between the salaries of their chief executives and what they pay their average U.K. workers, under proposed government rules.

Business Minister Greg Clark said that the government would set out new laws in Parliament on Monday directing that U.K.-listed companies with more than 250 employees would have to reveal their pay gaps and justify their CEOs’ salaries.

“We understand the anger of workers and shareholders when bosses’ pay is out of step with company performance,” Clark said in a statement Sunday.

He said the new laws would improve transparency and boost accountability for both shareholders and workers, as well as helping to “build a fairer economy.”

The new measures, which are subject to parliamentary approval, are part of the government’s “Industrial Strategy” and would come into effect January 1, 2019, meaning companies would start reporting in 2020.

When these rules were first proposed last year, they were criticized by union leaders, who said they fell short of Prime Minister Theresa May’s promise early on in her tenure to tackle soaring executive pay.

‘Unacceptable face’ of capitalism

She came to power after the 2016 Brexit vote vowing to tackle what she called the “unacceptable face” of capitalism, including pay gaps and mismanaged takeovers, which had driven a wedge between British bosses and their workers.

But some campaigners and investors have questioned whether the greater transparency provided by disclosures about boss-to-worker pay ratios would be enough to force companies to curb pay excesses.

Matthew Fell, chief U.K. policy director at the Confederation of British Industry, a British employers group, said that the new legislation would help develop a better dialogue between boards and employees.

“What’s most important is that all businesses make progress towards fair and proportionate pay outcomes,” he said.

While Luke Hildyard, director of the High Pay Center, a think tank, said the insight into pay ratios would be useful to investors, workers and wider society.

“We hope that it will initiate a more informed debate about what represents fair, proportionate pay for workers at all levels,” he said.

The plan to make public the worker-to-boss pay gap comes after May has already implemented rules to highlight pay discrepancies between genders.

Earlier this year, all U.K. companies with 250 or more employees had to publish details of the salary difference between male and female employees. They will report back annually on that pay gap.
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Police in the Kurdistan region of Iraq said Saturday that a 20-year-old

Iraqi man had admitted killing a 14-year-old girl in Germany, where the case has stoked the immigration debate.

The body of Susanna Feldman, of Mainz, near Frankfurt, was found Wednesday in a wooded area in Wiesbaden, near a refugee center where the alleged attacker had lived, German police said.

An autopsy showed she had been the victim of a violent and sexual attack. Feldman was Jewish, but police said there was no evidence her religion had been a factor in the attack, and the Central Council of Jews in Germany

cautioned against attributing any anti-Semitic motive.

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said Kurdish security forces had taken the suspect, identified by German authorities as Ali Bashar, into custody Friday.

“Officers in Zakho [in Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region] called me and said they had located the suspect and would arrest him as soon as he comes to the city,” Dohuk city police chief Tariq Ahmed told Reuters. “He had been staying at a hotel in Dohuk and after realizing the police were after him left for Zakho to stay at a relative’s house. He was asleep there at night and was arrested in that house at 5:30 [a.m.],” Ahmed said.

Confession

He said the suspect, during interrogation by Kurdish security authorities, had confessed to killing the German teenager. 

“The girl was a friend of his. They went on a trip to the woods and there they consumed a lot of alcohol and drugs, then got into a dispute and the girl tried to call the police,” Ahmed said. “The suspect became afraid because she was under 18 and he knew if the police came it would be a major charge.”

Ahmed added: “He tried to convince her not to call the police but she insisted, so he choked her and buried her beneath the dirt.”

German media reported earlier that Bashar was expected to be extradited to Germany on Saturday. German federal police declined to comment on the details emerging from the suspect’s arrest or on the report on the timing of extradition.

Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her dismay at the crime and said it should be a reminder to Germans of the need to do whatever possible for the integration of immigrants.

“The incredible suffering experienced by the family, the victim, affects everyone, including me,” she said on the sidelines of a G-7 summit meeting in Canada.

“The cooperation in this regard between German and Kurdish security authorities worked well here. … It is good that the alleged perpetrator was caught, that he probably also will be returning to Germany,” Merkel said.

She added, “This is a reminder to all of us, first, to take the task of integration very seriously, to make our common values very clear, again and again. But also to punish any crime. We can only live together if we all stick to our laws.”

Merkel’s decision to take in large numbers of asylum seekers during Europe’s 2015 migrant crisis has stirred a political backlash, with many politicians calling for new rules to make it easier to deport immigrants.

Bashar had been living in Germany as a refugee since 2015, German media have reported.

German police set up a special call center for tips from the public and issued releases in Arabic and Turkish. They said on Thursday that Bashar had most likely fled to Irbil in the Kurdistan Regional Government.
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Gena Turgel, a Holocaust survivor who comforted Anne Frank at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp before the young diarist’s death and the camp’s liberation a month later, has died. She was 95.

Turgel died Thursday, Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said on Twitter. The news triggered tributes from some of the people the Polish native touched in the decades she shared her World War II experiences, including witnessing the horrors of the Nazi camps at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen.

After World War II, Turgel married one of Bergen-Belsen’s British liberators, Norman Turgel, earning the nickname “The Bride of Belsen.” Her wedding dress, made from parachute silk, is part of the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London.

Turgel attended Britain’s annual Holocaust remembrance event two months ago, sitting in a wheelchair with a blanket draped over her knees.

“My story is the story of one survivor, but it is also the story of 6 million who perished,” she said at the event in London’s Hyde Park. “Maybe that’s why I was spared — so my testimony would serve as a memorial, like that candle that I light, for the men, women and children who have no voice.” 

Born in Krakow, Poland, as Gena Goldfinger on Feb. 1, 1923, Turgel and her family were forced to move into a Jewish ghetto with only a sack of potatoes, some flour and a few belongings in late 1941. One brother was shot by SS police and another disappeared after trying to escape, according to the Holocaust Educational Trust in London.

A sister of hers was shot while trying to smuggle food into a labor camp. In January 1945, Turgel and her mother were forced into a death march from Auschwitz, leaving her remaining sister behind.

‘I can still see that face’

It was in a hospital at Bergen-Belsen, where the 22-year-old Turgel arrived in February, that she cared for Anne Frank as the 15-year-old girl was dying from typhus.

“I washed her face, gave her water to drink, and I can still see that face, her hair and how she looked,” Turgel once told the BBC.

Turgel published a memoir, I Light a Candle, in 1987 and kept retelling her story in schools across Britain until the end of her life.

Turgel’s story “was difficult to hear and difficult for her to tell, but no one who heard her speak will ever forget,” said Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan said he met Turgel at the Hyde Park event in April and was “inspired by her lifelong commitment to educating people about the horrors of the Holocaust.”

“Let us hope for a better future where anti-Semitism and all hatred should be demolished, shouldn’t be tolerated,” Turgel said at the time. “And I do beg you, don’t forget those who are less fortunate than yourselves.”

She is survived by her three children, as well as grandchildren and great grandchildren.
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