Новини

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hosts his counterparts from Russia and Iran Wednesday for a second trilateral summit on Syria. The three, whose countries have a significant military presence in Syria, are increasingly cooperating to resolve the civil war under the auspices of the so-called “Astana Process.”

The deepening cooperation comes in the face of intense rivalries.  

“Since 2011, Ankara’s sole purpose was to dethrone Assad,” said Aydin Selcen, a former senior Turkish diplomat, who served widely in the region. “Whereas, Russia and Iran came to Syria upon Assad’s invitation to keep him in place and this is a contradiction,” he added, referring to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

All sides have so far managed their differences, out of an awareness, analysts suggest, that is based on the realization they need one another’s cooperation in efforts to secure their regional goals and ultimately bring an end to the seven-year conflict.

Under the “Astana Process,” so-called deconfliction zones have been created across Syria, in which rebel groups are concentrated. Ankara, with its close ties to those rebel groups, has worked closely with Moscow within the process. Wednesday’s meeting is expected to focus on the Syrian enclave of Idlib. Turkish forces have been steadily increasing their deployment there, creating observation posts to monitor the deconfliction zone.

The Turkish-led military campaign against the YPG Syrian-Kurdish militia is also expected to be on the agenda of Wednesday’s summit. Ankara accuses the militia of being a terrorist group linked to a decades-long Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey.

Last month, Turkish forces ousted the YPG from the Syrian enclave of Afrin, but Erdogan has pledged to expand the military operation across northern Syria up to the Iraqi border. Erdogan is expected to seek to assuage any concerns from Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Hassan Rouhani.

“The limits of the [Turkish military] operation [in Syria] will depend on the reaction of other actors who are stakeholders in Syria,” predicted Sinan Ulgen of Brussels-based Carnegie Europe, a research institution. With Russian air defenses currently controlling most of Syria’s airspace, Moscow up until now has given its tacit support to the offensive, allowing Turkish jets to fly with impunity in Syrian airspace in support of the operation.

Turkey-Iran tensions

Tehran has called for an end to the Turkish operation. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is expected to press his concerns over the operation in the talks with Erdogan. The two leaders are scheduled for a separate face-to-face meeting.

Analysts point out Iran is likely to be increasingly concerned about the growing number of Turkish armed forces in Syria. Tehran will be aware Turkish forces seldom withdraw once deployed in a neighboring country. Regional rivalries between the two powerful neighbors are exacerbated by sectarian tensions.

“I don’t see any good relation between Erdogan and the Islamic regime of Iran because Sunni and Shia Muslims are fighting for the same land in the Middle East,” warns Iranian expert Jamshid Assadi of France’s Burgundy Business School. “They might agree on not fighting a war, but that is all.”

Tehran’s recent cooperation with Ankara over Syria is giving Iran an opportunity to further undermine Turkey’s strained ties with the United States. That, observers say, is important for Iran, given the importance of Turkey in any new sanctions by the U.S. against Iran.

Also Rouhani, like Russia’s Putin, will be aware of the looming confrontation between Turkish and U.S. forces over the Syrian town of Manbij. Erdogan has pledged to oust the Kurdish YPG militia from Manbij, where U.S. forces are also deployed. Washington sees the YPG as a key ally in its war against Islamic State. Sources in Ankara have suggested the Turkish-led operation is as much about removing the U.S. presence in Syria as is the Kurdish militia.

Tehran, like Moscow, is also aware of the important role Ankara is playing in helping to facilitate the movement of rebels toward the region near the Turkish border.

“The Moscow-Tehran-Damascus trio wants all jihadists to seek refuge near the Turkish border, which is an extremely smart move on their part,” wrote columnist Barcin Yinanc of the Hurriyet Daily News. He warned, however, that Ankara could pay a heavy price. “There is no guarantee that these Islamist and jihadist groups will not end up hitting back at Turkey in the future.” Analysts, however, point out the priority for Ankara remains its ongoing campaign against the YPG.

 
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Poland’s prime minister claims Jews took part in their own destruction in the Holocaust. His Hungarian counterpart declares that the “color” of Europeans should not mix with that of Africans and Arabs. And the Croatian president has thanked Argentina for welcoming notorious pro-Nazi war criminals after World War II.

Ever since WWII, such views were taboo in Europe, confined to the far-right fringes. Today they are openly expressed by mainstream political leaders in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, part of a global populist surge in the face of globalization and mass migration.

“There is something broader going on in the region which has produced a patriotic, nativist, conservative discourse through which far-right ideas managed to become mainstream,” said Tom Junes, a historian and a researcher with the Human and Social Studies Foundation in Sofia, Bulgaria.

In many places, the shift to the right has included the rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators, often fighters or groups celebrated as anti-communists or defenders of national liberation. In Hungary and Poland, governments are also eroding the independence of courts and media, leading human rights groups to warn that democracy is threatened in parts of a region that threw off Moscow-backed dictatorships in 1989.

Some analysts say Russia is covertly helping extremist groups in order to destabilize Western liberal democracies. While that claim is difficult to prove with concrete evidence, it is clear that the growth of radical groups has pushed moderate conservative parties to veer to the right to hold onto votes.

That’s the case in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party — the front-runner in the April 8 elections — have drawn voters with an increasingly strident anti-migrant campaign.

Casting himself as the savior of a white Christian Europe being overrun by hordes of Muslims and Africans, Orban has insisted that Hungarians don’t want their “own color, traditions and national culture to be mixed by others.”

Orban, who is friendly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, was also the first European leader to endorse Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. In 2015 he erected razor wire at Hungary’s borders to stop migrants from crossing, and has since been warning in apocalyptic terms that the West faces racial and civilizational suicide if the migration continues.

Orban has also been obsessed with demonizing the financier and philanthropist George Soros, falsely portraying the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor as an advocate of uncontrolled immigration into Europe. In what critics denounce as a state-sponsored conspiracy theory with anti-Semitic overtones, the Hungarian government spent $48.5 million on anti-Soros ads in 2017, according to data compiled by investigative news site atlatszo.hu.

In a recent speech, Orban denounced Soros in language that echoed anti-Semitic clichés of the 20th century. He said Hungary’s foes “do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs.”

In nearby Poland, xenophobic language is also on the rise. The ruling party’s leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, claimed migrants carried “parasites” ahead of the 2015 elections. And when nationalists held a large Independence Day march in November — when some carried banners calling for a “White Europe” and “Clean Blood” — the interior minister called it a “beautiful sight.”

Poland’s government has also been embroiled in a bitter dispute with Israel and Jewish organizations over a law that would criminalize blaming Poland for Germany’s Holocaust crimes.

With tensions running high in February, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki listed “Jewish perpetrators” as among those who were responsible for the Holocaust. He also visited the Munich grave of an underground Polish resistance group that had collaborated with the Nazis.

In the same vein, an official tapped to create a major new history museum has condemned the postwar tribunals in Nuremberg, Germany — where top Nazis were judged — as “the greatest judicial farce in the history of Europe.” Arkadiusz Karbowiak said the Nuremberg trials were only “possible because of the serious role of Jews” in their organization, and called them “the place where the official religion of the Holocaust was created.”

Across the region, Roma, Muslims, Jews and other minorities have expressed anxiety about the future. But nationalists insist they are not promoting hate. They argue they’re defending their national sovereignty and Christian way of life against globalization and the large-scale influx of migrants who don’t assimilate.

The Balkans, bloodied by ethnic warfare in the 1990s, are also seeing a rise of nationalism, particularly in Serbia and Croatia. Political analysts there believe that Russian propaganda is spurring old ethnic resentments.

Croatia has steadily drifted to the right since joining the EU in 2013. Some officials there have denied the Holocaust or reappraised Croatia’s ultranationalist, pro-Nazi Ustasha regime, which killed tens of thousands of Jews, Serbs, Roma and anti-fascist Croats in wartime prison camps.

In a recent visit to Argentina, President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic thanked the country for providing post-war refuge to Croats who had belonged to the Ustasha regime.

The world’s top Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff of the Wiesenthal center, called her statement “a horrific insult to victims.” Grabar-Kitarovic later said she had not meant to glorify a totalitarian regime.

Meanwhile in Bulgaria, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency, the government includes a far-right alliance, the United Patriots, whose members have given Nazi salutes and slurred minorities. Deputy prime minister Valeri Simeonov has called Roma “ferocious humanoids” whose women “have the instincts of street dogs.”

Junes, the Sofia-based researcher, says that even though hate crimes are on the rise in Bulgaria, the problem has raised little concern in the West because the country keeps its public debt in check and is not challenging the fundamental Western consensus, unlike Poland and Hungary.

“Bulgaria isn’t rocking the boat,” Junes said. “They play along with Europe.”

While populist and far-right groups are also growing in parts of Western Europe, countries like Poland and Hungary are proving more vulnerable to the same challenges, said Peter Kreko, director of Political Capital Institute, a Budapest-based think tank.

“In younger, weaker, more fragile democracies,” Kreko said, “right-wing populism is more dangerous because it can weaken and even demolish the democratic institutions.”
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Last week’s tit-for-tat closure of U.S. and Russian consulates over the death of a former spy in Britain was intended to punish officials and diplomats, but ordinary citizens of both countries are already feeling the impact.

The fallout is most severe for Russian citizens and travel-minded Americans in the U.S. Northwest, who would normally seek visas, passport renewals and other documents at the Russian consulate in Seattle, which shut down Friday.

With Russia’s San Francisco consulate having already been closed in September, that leaves residents of the Seattle area with a minimum four-and-a-half-hour flight to the nearest functioning Russian consulate in Houston, Texas, some 3,000 kilometers (1,860) miles) away.

Gayane Yaffa, head of Russian visa services in Seattle, said her phone rang non-stop all week after the March 26 White House announcement.

“People started calling at 7 a.m. asking what to do now,” said Yaffa. “Many had already planned their trips and purchased tickets. People kept asking what to do. It was impossible to reach the consulate in Seattle, and those who succeeded were told there was no point in coming because the employees only gave out the ready passports with visas in them.”

Russia responded later last week by ordering the United States to close its consulate in St. Petersburg, the second busiest one in the country. But the impact of that closing will be less severe, since the U.S. consulate in Moscow — less than 700 kilometers (435 miles) to the southeast — will continue to operate.

Russian national Yuri Dukhovny, a Los Angeles resident, says he believes the exchange of closings is going to have a disproportionate impact on Russians.

“All conflicts between states first affect average citizens,” he said. “Many Russians need to renew passports and deal with paperwork. Not having any Russian consulates on the West Coast affects them greatly. Everything will now take forever.”

Script writer Jeremy Iverson, an American who says he moved to Russia a year ago to seek adventure, echoed that view, saying it is average Russians who ultimately will pay the price for the diplomatic gamesmanship.

“The closure of the (St. Petersburg) consulate isn’t actually going to impact American citizens  they’ll still have to go through the ILS system to mail in your documents needed for obtaining a visa,” he said. “It will impact Russian citizens who need consular services, those who are here and are trying to get passports changed, to get documentation  things like that. It’s going to be an issue for them.”

Moscow responded to the U.S. order to close the Seattle consulate with a Twitter poll asking Russian citizens which U.S. consulate should be closed in response.

What seemed like a sarcastic joke, said Russian political analyst Alexandr Konfisakhor, was actually a political tactic that appeared to shift responsibility for the decision to the will of the Russian people. Konfisakhor suggested it was a way for the Russian government to respond to the U.S. but not overdo it.

“You can get to Moscow from St. Petersburg in just a couple of hours. It means that everyone who needs a visa can easily get one. Closing a consulate in Yekaterinburg or Vladivostok would have been a much more serious inconvenience,” he said.

This story originated from VOA’s Russian Service. 
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Jailed former Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont insisted those who want independence for the northern Spanish region are not criminals.

“We want to decide our own future — is that a crime? We used ballot boxes — is that a crime?”  Puigdemont asked during a jail cell interview by a German news website.

“We were elected by the people, so what is the problem with the Spanish authorities? Why don’t they start politics in order to solve a political problem?”

German police arrested Puigdemont on a Spanish warrant last week. He is wanted in Spain on charges of inciting rebellion by defying the central government and going ahead with a Catalan independence referendum in October, leading to a violent police crackdown.

Puigdemont initially fled to Belgium to avoid arrest.

The French News Agency reported Puigdemont’s attorney has appealed the Supreme Court’s decision to prosecute him on the rebellion charges. The lawyer argued the charge implies Puigdemont advocated an uprising by violence. He said any violence that followed the October referendum was isolated and does not justify the charges.

Twenty-four other Catalan separatist leaders are also facing rebellion charges.

Pro-independence lawmakers won a slim majority in December’s parliamentary elections in Catalonia. However, parliament has been unable to name a new president since Puigdemont fled, and the future of independence is murky.

Catalonia, in northeast Spain, and its capital Barcelona are major tourist magnets. It has its own language and distinct culture, but the separatist crisis has hurt tourism and the regional economy.

Catalan separatists call the region a powerful economic engine that drives Spain, and they have demanded more autonomy.

Those who want to stay united with Spain fear the region will sink into an economic abyss without the central government, its ties to the European Union, and its numerous existing bilateral relations.
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The U.S. relationship with fellow NATO members comes under scrutiny again this week as U.S. President Donald Trump hosts a Baltic Summit at the White House on Tuesday.

According to a White House statement, Trump and President Kersti Kaljulaid of Estonia, President Raimonds Vejonis of Latvia, and President Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania are set to discuss how to strengthen security, business, trade, energy, and cultural partnerships between the United States and these three NATO allies.

The White House says the gathering will also highlight the countries’ recent success in meeting NATO’s defense spending pledge.

Trump has repeatedly criticized NATO member countries for not contributing their fair share to the alliance and not meeting their 2 percent defense spending benchmark. In a speech to NATO members last year, he noticeably failed to reiterate the U.S. commitment to NATO’s Article 5 pledge of mutual defense, rattling NATO allies.

Since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have grown increasingly worried about Russia’s regional military buildup and the possibility that they could suffer a similar fate as Crimea.

The countries have since pledged to boost their defense spending, counting on NATO allies to provide military assistance should Russia take any action.

Latvian President Raimons Vejonis told Latvian television last week that he expects Washington to publicly commit to the region’s security. “It is planned to adopt a declaration, from which we expect a very strong political message from the U.S. expressing support for strengthening Baltic security and expressing, once again, support for the independence of the Baltic states,” he said.

New spike in tensions

The U.S.-Baltic summit comes amid heighten tensions between Russia and the West.

Last week, the U.S. and more than two dozen countries – including the three Baltic States – expelled a total of more than 150 Russian diplomats in a show of solidarity over the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. Russia responded by announcing the expulsion of more than 150 foreign diplomats, including 60 U.S. diplomats.

In addition to the expulsions, the U.S. and the Baltic states have been accusing Russia of conducting a barrage of cyberattacks and spreading fake news, propaganda, and disinformation online in an effort to meddle in European countries’ political systems and sway public opinion in favor of Russia’s agenda. Top U.S. intelligence officials have accused Russia of interfering in 2016 US presidential election and taking steps to undermine the 2018 midterm elections.  

“I think what we have seen in the past four or three years is the community of democratic nations is under the attack,” Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics recently told VOA’s Russian Service, referring to Russian interference.  

“The very basis of our democratic institutions are under attack through social media by fake news, and also through the influence of money, and it is very important that we stick together,” he said.

Russia test-fired its new liquid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile Sarmat on Friday. Latvia’s Defense Ministry said Thursday it was concerned by a sudden announcement from Russia that it will test-fire missiles in the Baltic Sea between Latvia and Sweden on April 4 and 6.

Last month, Trump congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin on his re-election victory during a phone call and said the two agreed to hold talks in the “not-too-distant future.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Monday they discussed the meeting could take place “at a number of potential venues, including the White House.”
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German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas wants to resume dialogue with Russia and gradually improve ties after diplomatic expulsions over a nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in England that Britain blames on Russia, he said on Sunday.

Conservative German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Maas have joined the United States and other European countries in standing with Britain in a major standoff over the attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

Maas, a member of the Social Democrats (SPD) who are split on how tough to be on Moscow, told Bild am Sonntag much trust had been lost in the last few years due to Russia’s behavior.

“At the same time, we need Russia as a partner to settle regional conflicts, for disarmament and as an important pillar of multilateralism,” he was quoted as saying in the paper.

“We are therefore open for dialogue and are trying to rebuild trust bit by bit if Russia is ready.”

He also, however, defended the decision to expel diplomats, “to show solidarity with Britain but also as a signal of unity.”

In the last week, as part of mass expulsions on both sides, Germany expelled four Russian diplomats and Moscow has reciprocated with the same number, prompting talk of a crisis in relations between Russia and the West.

Some Social Democrats have urged the ‘grand coalition’ of their party and Merkel’s conservatives to ensure a new Cold War does not start, and business groups are also worried.

Germany relies on Russia for roughly a third of the gas it uses and, before Western states imposed sanctions on Russia over its role in the Ukraine crisis, Europe’s biggest economy exported about 38 billion euros of goods to Russia.

London accuses Moscow of being responsible for the first known use of a military-grade nerve agent on European soil since World War II and Germany has repeatedly called on Moscow to cooperate more with the investigations.
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To track down people in Britain who may have broken immigration rules, the government is turning to a new and controversial source of information: doctors.

In letters made public last month, politicians sparred with immigration officials over a data-sharing agreement quietly signed in 2016 that gives the government access to personal information collected by the country’s family doctors. Medical details are excluded.

A parliamentary health committee condemned the situation as “unacceptable,” calling for the agreement to be suspended. But Britain’s immigration department has dismissed those concerns, arguing that such data sharing allows the U.K. to remove people “who might pose a danger to the public.”

Doctors who work with refugees and asylum-seekers have described it as a major breach of medical ethics, saying it isn’t up to physicians to enforce immigration rules.

“We understand the government has a job to do, but going into health records to get patient information is not OK,” said Lucy Jones, director of programs at Doctors of the World U.K. “The idea that any patient information is being shared with a government body immediately breaks their trust in a doctor-patient relationship.”

Several leading medical organizations, including the Royal College of General Practitioners, Public Health England and the General Medical Council, have all slammed the data-sharing deal, saying it could worsen the health of vulnerable people and drive disease outbreaks underground, hurting health care for all.

Dalia Omer, a refugee from Sudan who was granted asylum in the U.K. in February after nearly two years, sought medical help several times while awaiting the government’s decision. She said had she known about the data sharing arrangement, she would not have been as forthcoming.

“If I knew the doctors could share information with the Home Office, I would not tell them everything,” she said, referring to the British department that oversees immigration and security. She said she might even lie about certain details to protect herself.

Dr. Kitty Worthing, a London-based doctor with the group Docs Not Cops, said “the cornerstone of the doctor-patient relationship is confidentiality and this data-sharing is a direct breach of that.” She said when she’s advised people that their personal information could be shared with immigration officials “their reaction is always fear.”

Elsewhere in Europe, many countries have a strict firewall that stops information gathered by health services from being disclosed to other government agencies. Germany’s data protection office said regulations prohibit any blanket sharing of such information. In France, no data obtained by doctors is shared with the Interior Ministry.

Some health experts said it was critical that some types of health care are available to everyone in the U.K., regardless of their immigration status.

“With HIV treatment, it makes much more sense to treat everybody with HIV, because treatment lowers the level of virus in your blood so you can’t pass it on,” said Kat Smithson of the National AIDS Trust. “If people are not diagnosed because they’re not accessing health care, they’re not aware they’re living with HIV, which means they’re far more likely to pass it on to somebody else.”

The British government, however, says protecting its borders outweighs those concerns.

“We believe that the release of (patient) information is lawful and proportionate action in pursuit of the effective enforcement of the U.K.’s immigration policy,” wrote Caroline Noakes, the minister of state for immigration and James O’Shaughnessy, parliamentary undersecretary of state for health, responding to lawmaker’s concerns.

They cited the case of a Pakistani citizen who overstayed a visitor’s visa. After the Pakistani was refused residency in 2013, contact with the Home Office was broken off. Immigration officials sent a request to health services, which revealed a new address.

“The Home Office visited the address and arrested the individual, a convicted sex offender, who is now complying with the Home Office and will leave the U.K.,” Noakes and O’Shaughnessy wrote, describing patients’ non-medical data as being “at the lower end of the privacy spectrum.”

From last November to January, health officials agreed to nearly 1,300 requests for information. Of those, health officials found 501 cases where patients had a different address from the one in Home Office records.

Some Londoners said it was OK for immigration officials to get data from doctors under certain conditions.

“If the Home Office needs the information for a good reason, I guess it’s OK, but they should ask the people for permission,” said Farooq, outside an east London clinic that provides health care largely for migrants. He declined to give his last name because he was worried about the immigration status of his father, originally from Afghanistan.

Farooq said data sharing could make migrants nervous about getting medical attention.

“It could put people in a risky situation if they’re worried about their visa and they need to see a doctor,” he said.
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Christians around the world Sunday are celebrating Easter —

the day they believe Jesus arose from the dead. It is the holiest day of the Christian calendar.

Easter is Christianity’s “moveable feast,” falling on a different date each year. Western Christian churches celebrate Easter on the first Sunday following the full moon after the vernal equinox.

Thousands of the faithful gathered in the Vatican’s Saint Peter’s Square to hear Pope Francis deliver the annual “Urbi et Orbi” — “to the city and to the world” — Easter address.

Easter marks the end of Holy Week, which is the week before Easter and includes Maundy Thursday, the day of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples. Holy Week also includes Good Friday, the day Jesus was crucified.

The Eastern Orthodox church celebrates Easter next Sunday, April 8.

The two Easters are usually weeks apart with the Western Christian church following the Gregorian calendar, while the Eastern Orthodox uses the older Julian calendar. Last year, however, Easter was celebrated on the same day in both traditions.

 
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Crowds lined the streets of Cambridge, England, on Saturday for the funeral of one of the world’s most famous scientists: physicist Stephen Hawking, who died March 14 at age 76.

The scientist, confined for decades to a wheelchair and voice synthesizer because of the disease ALS, was known for his charisma, curiosity, and a crackling sense of humor. His science books and television cameos made him a pop-culture icon.

Hawking described his research as seeking “a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

Hawking’s funeral was held Saturday at the Cambridge University church known as Great St. Mary’s. As the funeral procession arrived, bells rang 76 times — once for each year of Hawking’s life.

In addition to Hawking’s family members, caretakers, former students, and admirers, the ceremony was attended by a number of famous faces. Among them was actor Eddie Redmayne, who played Hawking in an award-winning film biography of his life called The Theory of Everything, released in 2014.

Redmayne’s co-star, Felicity Jones, model Lily Cole, Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May, and Britain’s Astronomer Royal, the Lord Rees of Ludlow (Martin Rees), were also there.

The eulogy, read by professor Faye Dowker, praised Hawking as someone “revered for his devotion as a scholar to the pursuit of knowledge.”

Hawking will be given one last high honor: his remains are to be interred in Westminster Abbey among some of Britain’s most legendary intellectuals. Hawking will take his place next to 17th-century mathematical scientist Isaac Newton and near 19th-century evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin.
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Many students would be delighted to have the World Cup in town, but not Maria Cheremnova.

The 20-year-old physics student in Moscow is one of thousands campaigning against the June 14-July 15 soccer tournament, which is set to disrupt academic life across the country.

There will be a 25,000-capacity fan zone outside the main building at Russia’s prestigious Moscow State University during exam season. In other cities, exams have been brought forward and thousands of police are set to move into dorm rooms.

The Moscow fan zone – a public viewing area with a big screen, beer and music – is on prime real estate near the vast Luzhniki arena, the river and the main university building, a Stalin-era colossus that ranks among the Russian capital’s most recognizable structures.

 The building is also home to around 6,500 students. Residents say it doesn’t have great soundproofing.

“I came to university to study, not to watch football and listen to that noise,” Cheremnova said. “Imagine 25,000 people and the events at night. It’ll all be visible, with lights, a big screen, music and fans, who aren’t very quiet guys. It’s going to stop people sleeping before their exams. It’s just awful.”

 It will also mean extra strain on already struggling transport networks – the fan zone is two subway stops from Luzhniki stadium – and fans could damage a nearby nature reserve, Cheremnova claimed.

A group of Moscow State University students and recent graduates has gathered more than 4,600 signatures demanding the fan zone be moved to another location. They said more students and staff would have signed but feared retaliation from the university administration. When attempting to deliver the petition to the rector’s office, security guards blocked the way and elevator access was cut to that floor only, supposedly for repair.

Russian universities have little tradition of student protest. While they were hotbeds of activism before the Russian Revolution of 1917, in Soviet times access to a college education was closely linked to political loyalty and membership of groups like the Young Communist League.

World Cup organizers have revised earlier plans for Moscow’s fan zone to be larger and closer to the university. FIFA said “to lessen the impact of the event on students and the adjacent infrastructure of the university, it was agreed to move the stage away from the main building by several meters, to reduce the capacity to 25,000 spectators and to change access flows.”

Opposition not only in Moscow

Across Russia, the tournament has brought upheaval for students.

The Russian academic year often runs well into the summer months, and late June is usually prime time for exams.

In most of the 11 host cities, university dorms are due to turn into temporary barracks for police and National Guard troops brought in from out of town for the tournament.

Many universities have brought forward examinations, often by more than a month, to avoid the World Cup and free up dorm space for security forces.

That means semesters have been cut short with little warning, forcing students to cram more studies into less time. Cheremnova said that some Moscow State University students were told to prepare for earlier examinations, only for the decision to be reversed.

At the Southern Federal University in Rostov-on-Don, semesters run back-to-back since “the winter vacation was postponed until the summer period,” according to spokesman Andrei Svechnikov.

What’s angering students more than anything else is the prospect of being forced to move out of rooms they’ve paid for.

Despite official denials from the Education and Science Ministry that any students will be kicked out to make way for security forces, more than 2,800 students have signed a petition against alleged removals.

“There will be no forced eviction of students under this process,” the ministry told The Associated Press, adding that security forces will “not disrupt the learning process.”

The AP contacted 17 universities cited in local media reports as planning to evict students for the World Cup. Of those, six said no students would be forced to move, one said a small number would be required to move to other dorms, and 10 failed to reply.

In many cities, students report mixed messages from university officials over accommodation and study schedules.

Zhokhangir Mirzadzhanov, a student in the western city of Kaliningrad, said his university initially offered to buy tickets for students to leave the city and free up dorm space for the tournament but details remained unclear.

“There are a lot of simple issues that they still can’t answer,” he said. “What comes next, no one knows.”
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Pope Francis presided over solemn Good Friday services amid tight security at Rome’s Colosseum for the Via Crucis procession. Italian police and army soldiers were on high alert, with Holy Week coinciding with a spate of arrests of suspected Islamic extremists around Italy.

Francis presided at a traditional candle-lit Way of the Cross procession around Rome’s ancient Colosseum. Some 20,000 people turned out to take part in the event with the pope on the most somber day in the Christian liturgical calendar, which commemorates the death of Jesus on the cross.

Rome authorities increased security this year with checks carried out as the faithful approached the area. Italian police carried out four raids against suspected supporters of Islamist terrorism, arresting seven people, including one man who was believed to have been planning a truck attack.

The Way of the Cross procession marks 14 events, called stations, beginning with Roman governor Pontius Pilate’s condemning Jesus to death, until his burial in a tomb. This year the meditations at each station were written by Catholic high school and college students in keeping with Francis’ decision to dedicate 2018 to addressing the hopes and concerns of young Catholics.

At the end, he delivered a meditation of his own, denouncing those who seek power, money and conflict. He prayed that the Catholic Church be always an “ark of salvation, a source of certainty and truth.”

Pope Francis also said many should feel “shame because our generations are leaving young people a world that is fractured by divisions and wars, a world devoured by selfishness where young people, children, the sick and the elderly are marginalized.”

The pope praised those in the Church who are trying to arouse “humanity’s sleeping conscience” through their work helping the poor, immigrants, and prison inmates.

Earlier, the pope presided over a solemn Passion of the Lord service in St. Peter’s Basilica which was kept open despite several pieces of plaster having come crashing down from a pillar of the church on Thursday. The damage was swiftly repaired.

Thousands of faithful filled the basilica. Francis lay prostrate in prayer on the marble pavement in front of the altar at the start of the chant-filled evening service. Later, the crucifix was carried in procession from the back of the basilica to the pope who then kissed it. The other concelebrants followed his example.

On Holy Saturday, in the evening, the pope will celebrate the solemn Easter Vigil in St. Peter’s Basilica, followed by the joyful Easter Sunday Mass marking what Christians observe as Christ’s resurrection.

 
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