Новини

The father-in-law of Pippa Middleton, whose sister Kate is married to Britain’s Prince William, has been placed under formal investigation over suspected rape of a minor, a court source told Reuters on Friday.

David Matthews, who is the father of Pippa Middleton’s husband, James Matthews, was arrested Tuesday by the Juvenile Protection Brigade (BPM) and formally put under investigation for suspected rape of a minor under his authority, said the source, confirming a report on Europe 1 radio.

Paris prosecutors arrested Matthews during a visit to France, and later released him and placed him under judicial control, the source said. The source did not say when he was released. French police can hold suspects 24 or 48 hours in such cases.

The source said the alleged rape took place in 1998 or 1999. Europe 1 reported that a complaint was filed in 2017.

Reuters could not immediately reach Matthews nor any spokespeople or lawyers for him.

Being placed under judicial control means that prosecutors have attached certain conditions to his release or imposed certain limits on whom he can meet or where he can go. The source did not say what conditions had been attached in Matthews’ case.

Pippa Middleton came to national attention in Britain as the maid of honor at her sister’s royal wedding to William in 2011. Her own lavish wedding to James Matthews last May was one of the most widely reported social events of the year, attended by William and his brother Harry, grandsons of Queen Elizabeth.
…

Russian ships are skulking around underwater communications cables, causing the U.S. and its allies to worry the Kremlin might be taking information warfare to new depths.

Is Moscow interested in cutting or tapping the cables? Does it want the West to worry it might? Is there a more innocent explanation? Unsurprisingly, Russia isn’t saying.

But whatever Moscow’s intentions, U.S. and Western officials are increasingly troubled by their rival’s interest in the 400 fiber-optic cables that carry most of world’s calls, emails and texts, as well as $10 trillion worth of daily financial transactions.

“We’ve seen activity in the Russian navy, and particularly undersea in their submarine activity, that we haven’t seen since the ’80s,” General Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of the U.S. European Command, told Congress this month.

Without undersea cables, a bank in Asian countries couldn’t send money to Saudi Arabia to pay for oil. U.S. military leaders would struggle to communicate with troops fighting extremists in Afghanistan and the Middle East. A student in Europe wouldn’t be able to Skype his parents in the United States.

Small passageways

All this information is transmitted along tiny glass fibers encased in undersea cables that, in some cases, are little bigger than a garden hose. All told, there are 620,000 miles of fiber-optic cable running under the sea, enough to loop around Earth nearly 25 times.

Most lines are owned by private telecommunications companies, including giants like Google and Microsoft. Their locations are easily identified on public maps, with swirling lines that look like spaghetti. While cutting one cable might have limited impact, severing several simultaneously or at choke points could cause a major outage.

The Russians “are doing their homework and, in the event of a crisis or conflict with them, they might do rotten things to us,” said Michael Kofman, a Russian military expert at nonprofit research group CNA Corp.

It’s not Moscow’s warships and submarines that are making NATO and U.S. officials uneasy. It’s Russia’s Main Directorate of Deep Sea Research, whose specialized surface ships, submarines, underwater drones and minisubs conduct reconnaissance, underwater salvage and other work.

One ship run by the directorate is the Yantar. It’s a modest, 354-foot oceanographic vessel that holds a crew of about 60. It most recently was off South America’s coast helping Argentina search for a lost submarine.

Parlamentskaya Gazeta, the Russian parliament’s publication, last October said the Yantar has equipment “designed for deep-sea tracking” and “connecting to top-secret communication cables.” The publication said that in September 2015, the Yantar was near Kings Bay, Georgia, home to a U.S. submarine base, “collecting information about the equipment on American submarines, including underwater sensors and the unified [U.S. military] information network.” Rossiya, a Russian state TV network, has said the Yantar not only can connect to top-secret cables but also can cut them and “jam underwater sensors with a special system.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Preparing for sabotage

There is no hard evidence that the ship is engaged in nefarious activity, said Steffan Watkins, an information technology security consultant in Canada tracking the ship. But he wonders what the ship is doing when it’s stopped over critical cables or when its Automatic Identification System tracking transponder isn’t on.

Of the Yantar’s crew, he said: “I don’t think these are the actual guys who are doing any sabotage. I think they’re laying the groundwork for future operations.”

Members of Congress are wondering, too. 

Representative Joe Courtney, a Connecticut Democrat on a House subcommittee on sea power, said of the Russians, “The mere fact that they are clearly tracking the cables and prowling around the cables shows that they are doing something.”

Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, an Armed Services Committee member, said Moscow’s goal appears to be to “disrupt the normal channels of communication and create an environment of misinformation and distrust.”

The Yantar’s movements have previously raised eyebrows.

On October 18, 2016, a Syrian telecom company ordered emergency maintenance to repair a cable in the Mediterranean that provides internet connectivity to several countries, including Syria, Libya and Lebanon. The Yantar arrived in the area the day before the four-day maintenance began. It left two days before the maintenance ended. It’s unknown what work it did while there.

Watkins described another episode on November 5, 2016, when a submarine cable linking Persian Gulf nations experienced outages in Iran. Hours later, the Yantar left Oman and headed to an area about 60 miles west of the Iranian port city of Bushehr, where the cable runs ashore. Connectivity was restored just hours before the Yantar arrived on November 9. The boat stayed stationary over the site for several more days.

Undersea cables have been targets before.

At the beginning of World War I, Britain cut a handful of German underwater communications cables and tapped the rerouted traffic for intelligence. In the Cold War, the U.S. Navy sent American divers deep into the Sea of Okhotsk off the Russian coast to install a device to record Soviet communications, hoping to learn more about the U.S.S.R.’s submarine-launched nuclear capability.

Eavesdropping by spies

More recently, British and American intelligence agencies have eavesdropped on fiber-optic cables, according to documents released by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor.

In 2007, Vietnamese authorities confiscated ships carrying miles of fiber-optic cable that thieves salvaged from the sea for profit. The heist disrupted service for several months. And in 2013, Egyptian officials arrested three scuba divers off Alexandria for attempting to cut a cable stretching from France to Singapore. Five years on, questions remain about the attack on a cable responsible for about a third of all internet traffic between Egypt and Europe.

Despite the relatively few publicly known incidents of sabotage, most outages are due to accidents.

Two hundred or so cable-related outages take place each year. Most occur when ship anchors snap cables or commercial fishing equipment snags the lines. Others break during tsunamis, earthquakes and other natural disasters.

But even accidental cuts can harm U.S. military operations. 

In 2008 in Iraq, unmanned U.S. surveillance flights nearly screeched to a halt one day at Balad Air Base, not because of enemy mortar attacks or dusty winds. An anchor had snagged a cable hundreds of miles away from the base, situated in the “Sunni Triangle” northwest of Baghdad.

The severed cable had linked controllers based in the United States with unmanned aircraft flying intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions for coalition forces in the skies over Iraq, said retired Air Force Colonel Dave Lujan of Hampton, Virginia.

“Say you’re operating a remote-controlled car and all of a sudden you can’t control it,” said Lujan, who was deputy commander of the 332nd Expeditionary Operations Group at the base when the little-publicized outage lasted for two to three days. “That’s a big impact,” he said, describing how U.S. pilots had to fly the missions instead.
…

French lawyers staged a walkout Friday while Air France staff went on strike over pay, adding to a growing wave of industrial unrest that threatens to slow President Emmanuel Macron’s reform drive.

Air France canceled a quarter of the day’s flights as its pilots, stewards and ground crew press for a 6 percent pay rise.

And courts postponed hearings as hundreds of lawyers, clerks and magistrates stopped work across the country to protest judicial reforms, among a slew of changes by the ambitious 40-year-old president riling various sections of French society.

“The government’s plan at least has the benefit of being coherent — scrimping, cutting, sacrificing everything it can,” legal profession unions said in a joint statement ahead of protests Friday afternoon.

Law unions complain that the court shake-up, which aims to streamline penal and civil proceedings and digitize the court system, will result in courts that are over-centralized and “dehumanized.”

They particularly object to the scrapping of 307 district courts and their judges which they say will result in a judiciary that is “remote from the people.”

In the meantime, staff at state rail operator SNCF will begin three months of rolling strikes, two days out of every five, on Monday evening — just as many travelers are coming back from an Easter weekend away.

The next day, refuse collectors will strike demanding the creation of a national waste service, energy workers will strike urging a new national electricity and gas service, and Air France staff will walk out again.

“The cost of living goes up, but not salaries,” Francois, an Air France employee, told AFP during a demonstration at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport, saying a six percent raise represents “barely a baguette a day for a month.”

Various universities across the country have, meanwhile, been disrupted for weeks by protests against Macron’s decision to introduce an element of selection to the public university admissions process.

‘Growth first, raise later’

Macron has so far avoided the mass industrial action suffered by his predecessor Francois Hollande.

But discord has been growing, with an estimated 200,000 taking to the streets last week in protests and walkouts by workers across the public sector angered by his reforms, including plans to cut 120,000 jobs.

Elected last May, the centrist ex-investment banker has pledged to shake up everything from France’s courts to its education system.

At Air France, 32 percent of pilots were set to join Friday’s walkout along with 28 percent of cabin crew and 20 percent of ground staff, according to company estimates.

But while just 20 to 30 percent of long-haul flights were cut at Charles de Gaulle and Orly in Paris, at other airports such as Nice, as many as half of Air France flights were cancelled.

The French state owns 17.6 percent of the carrier as part of the Air France-KLM group, Europe’s second-biggest airline, which has been plagued by strikes and labor disputes in its French operations in recent years.

Eleven trade unions have already staged two Air France strikes on February 22 and March 23 seeking a six percent salary hike, with two more planned on April 3 and April 7.

Unions argue the airline should share the wealth with its staff after strong results last year, but management insists it cannot offer higher salaries without jeopardizing growth in an intensely competitive sector.

“To distribute wealth we have to create it first,” chief executive Franck Terner told Le Parisien newspaper.

Air France is set to bring in a 0.6 percent pay rise from April 1 and another 0.4 percent increase from October 1, along with bonuses and promotions equivalent to a 1.4 percent raise for ground staff — seen by unions as grossly inadequate.
…

The State Department responded swiftly to an announcement by the Kremlin that Russia will retaliate for the expulsions of Russian diplomats from the U.S., Britain and other countries. Moscow announced Thursday it is expelling 60 U.S. diplomats and closing the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg. State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert told reporters that is not justified and the U.S. reserves the right to respond. VOA’s Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine has more from the State Department.
…

Girls who spend the most time on social media at age 10 may be unhappier in their early teens than peers who use social media less during the tween years, a U.K. study suggests.

Researchers looked at social media use and scores on tests of happiness and other aspects of well-being among boys and girls at age 10 and each year until age 15. Overall, well-being decreased with age for boys and girls, but more so for girls. And high social media use early on predicted sharper increases in unhappiness for girls later.

For boys, social media use at 10 had no association with well-being in the midteens, which suggests that other factors are more important influences on well-being changes in boys, the authors note in BMC Public Health.

A pattern for girls

“Our findings suggest that young girls, those aged 10, who are more interactive with social media have lower levels of well-being by age 15 than their peers who interact with social media less at age 10. We did not find any similar patterns for boys, suggesting that any changes in their well-being may not be due to social media,” said lead author Cara Booker, a researcher at the University of Essex.

Booker’s research group had done a previous study of social media use and well-being in adolescents, but wanted to explore how it changes over time, she said in an email. They had also noticed gender differences and wanted to look more closely at them, she added.

The study team analyzed data on nearly 10,000 teens from a large national survey of U.K. households conducted annually from 2009 to 2015. The researchers focused on how much time young participants spent chatting on social media on a typical school day.

The survey also contained questions about “strengths and difficulties” that assessed emotional and behavioral problems, and researchers generated a happiness score based on responses to other questions about school, family and home life.

Social media use

The researchers found that adolescent girls used social media more than boys, though social media interaction increased with age for both boys and girls.

At age 13, about half of girls were interacting on social media for more than one hour a day, compared to just one-third of boys.

By age 15, girls continued to use social media more than boys, with about 60 percent of girls and just less than half of the boys interacting on social media for one or more hours per day.

Social and emotional difficulties declined with age for boys, but rose for girls.

It’s possible that girls are more sensitive than boys to social comparisons and interactions that impact self-esteem, the authors write. Or that the sedentary time spent on social media impacts health and happiness in other ways.

“Many hours of daily use may not be ideal,” Booker said.

Digitally literacy needed

The study cannot prove whether or how social media interactions affect young people’s well-being. The authors note that compared to girls, boys may spend more time gaming than chatting online, yet gaming has become increasingly social so it’s possible that it also has an effect that they did not examine in this study.

Parents should become more digitally literate as well as teach their children how to positively interact with social media, Booker said. Dealing with filtered posts and mostly positive posts may lead to incorrect conclusions about others’ lives that lead to lower levels of well-being, she noted.

“I don’t want people to come away with the idea that social media is bad, just that increased use at a young age may be detrimental for girls,” she said.

More research needs to be done on why and whether this persists into adulthood, Booker added.
…

A committee of British lawmakers published written evidence on Thursday provided by a whistleblower who says information about 50 million Facebook users ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica said the documents did not support whistleblower Christopher Wylie’s testimony to the committee this week.

Wylie, who formerly worked for Cambridge Analytica (CA), alleges the data was used to help to build profiles on American voters and raise support for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Wylie also alleges that CA was linked to Canadian firm AggregateIQ (AIQ), which he says was involved in the development of the software used to target voters. AggregateIQ, he says, received payment from a pro-Brexit campaign group before the 2016 referendum when Britain voted to quit the European Union.

This was co-ordinated with the lead “Vote Leave” group in a breach of British electoral funding rules, Wylie alleged.  Vote Leave denies any wrongdoing.

Wylie appeared before the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the British parliament on Tuesday. The committee said Wylie provided it with documents including a services agreement between AIQ and SCL Elections, an affiliate of Cambridge Analytica, dated September 2014.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the documents made public by the committee.

“None of these documents support the false allegations made in Tuesday’s hearing,” Cambridge Analytica said in a statement, adding that Wylie had left the company in July 2014 and would have no direct knowledge of its work or practices since then.

“It is wrong to suggest that Cambridge Analytica’s earlier relationship with Aggregate IQ implies that we were involved with their work for Vote Leave. Cambridge Analytica did no work in any capacity in the 2016 EU referendum.”

AIQ did not respond to a Reuters request for comment after Tuesday’s committee hearing, but in an earlier statement said it had never entered into a contract with Cambridge Analytica and had never been part of the firm.

The parliamentary committee’s chairman has said it was “astonishing” that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided not to answer lawmakers’ questions, given the claims that Wylie had made about how data was used.
…

A man shouted death threats from his car window at several groups of French soldiers out for a Thursday morning jog in the French Alps, then tried to run two of them over, a military spokesman said.

Col. Benoit Brulot, a French Army spokesman, told the AP that the driver circled the military barracks in Varces-Allieres-et-Risset, in the southeastern Isere region, shouting at groups of soldiers. He returned later and tried to hit the two soldiers with his car before making a quick getaway.

Brulot said that none of the soldiers, from the 27th Mountain Infantry Brigade, was injured.

Authorities are on high alert as the incident occurred one week after an Islamic extremist shot at police returning from jogging in southern France, before taking hostages in a supermarket in an attack that claimed four lives.

Brulot said several of the soldiers were questioned Thursday morning by gendarmes in nearby Grenoble. The motives for the attempted attack are currently unclear.

Jean-Luc Corbet, mayor of Varces-Allieres-et-Risset, told BFM-TV authorities are currently searching for the vehicle and the driver and an inquiry has been opened in Grenoble.

 
…

The former Soviet republic of Georgia says it will expel a Russia diplomat in solidarity with Britain over the nerve agent poisoning of a former Russian spy.

Thursday’s announcement follows the expulsion of more than 150 Russian diplomats by European Union nations, the United States, NATO and other countries in response to the March 4 poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

Georgia severed diplomatic ties with Russia following a brief war in the breakaway republic of South Ossetia. Russian diplomats have been operating out of the special interests section of the Swiss embassy in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, since 2009.

Georgia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Thursday that the diplomat has been declared persona non grata and must leave within a week. The ministry condemned the poisoning, calling it a “serious challenge to common security.”
…

The world could see its first city with a population of 100 million by the end of this century. That is the conclusion of new research into the speed of urbanization in many fast-growing countries in Africa and Asia, which suggests even small cities could balloon into huge metropolises in the coming decades.

By the end of the century, the world’s population is forecast to reach up to 14 billion. Eighty percent of those people will be living in cities, according to new research from the Ontario Institute of Technology. 

“We are now seeing the urbanization wave headed through China, it is toward the latter part of its urbanization. And now it is headed for India, and then we will see it culminate in the big cities of sub-Saharan Africa,” co-author and professor Daniel Hoornweg told VOA via Skype.

That could mean the first 100-million population city, and the top candidate is Lagos, Nigeria.

WATCH: Africa Could See World’s First 100 Million City by Century’s End

Africa and cities

Today its population is 20 million, not the largest, as that accolade belongs to Tokyo with about 38 million people, but one of the fastest growing. In two generations, Lagos has grown a hundredfold. By 2100 it is projected to be home to more people than the state of California.

“Lagos, Dar Es Salaam, Kinshasa: These are the cities that are looking at four- to five-fold increases in population. By the end of the century, the lion’s share of large cities, the top 20 if you will, most of those will be in Africa,” Hoornweg said.

Lagos sprawls across 1,000 square kilometers, an urban jungle of skyscrapers, shanty towns and everything in between. Its population grows by 900 people per day.

The poorest residents, often migrant communities, live in slums by the lagoon. Amnesty International has warned of ruthless forced evictions to make way for new developments, which have left more than 30,000 people homeless and 11 dead.

Oladipupo Aiveomiye lives in the Ilaje-Bariga shantytown.

“The threat of being evicted, the threat of being chased away overnight has gripped people to the extent that they cannot even work or operate in this area,” he said.

Young continent

Across Africa the median age is younger than 20 and the fertility rate is 4.4 births per woman. Even small cities are forecast to balloon in size. Niamey in Niger could grow from less than 1 million today to 46 million by the end of the century; Blantyre in Malawi from 1 million to 40 million.

Asia, too, will witness huge urban growth, with Kabul in Afghanistan projected to hit 50 million people.

Hoornweg says despite the associated problems of slums, poor sanitation and pollution, increasing urbanization can be a good thing.

“Cities, by their nature, because of a more compact lifestyle, can provide a quality of life higher than anywhere else with less energy per unit of GDP,” he said. “So, cities actually provide a really important opportunity. We will not get to global sustainability without big cities.”

Many cities in the West are predicted to plateau or decline in size. By the end of the century, only 14 of the biggest 100 are forecast to be in North America or Europe.
…

The Ecuadorean government said Wednesday that it had cut off Julian Assange’s ability to communicate outside its embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder has lived for more than five years.

The government said it stopped Assange from communicating with the outside world to prevent him from meddling in other countries’ affairs. 

The move came two days after Assange questioned, on Twitter, Britain’s accusation that Russia was behind the March 4 poisoning of a Russian former double agent in Salisbury, England.

Assange was granted asylum in Ecuador’s embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning about allegations of sex crimes, which he has denied committing.

The Swedish investigation was closed almost one year ago, but Assange, who was on bail when he entered the embassy, faces arrest by British authorities for violating his bail terms if he steps outside.

A British judge refused to end legal proceedings against Assange last month for jumping bail. The judge said Assange “wants to impose his terms on the course of justice.” 
…

British Prime Minister Theresa May has praised the “very strong response” by the United States, which ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats after Moscow was blamed for a nerve agent attack against a former Russian spy in Britain.

A Downing street statement says May spoke to President Donald Trump by phone, telling him that Britain welcomes the U.S. response to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the British town of Salisbury earlier this month.

The White House said “both leaders agreed on the importance of dismantling Russia’s spy networks in the United Kingdom and the United States to curtail Russian clandestine activities and prevent future chemical weapons attacks on either country’s soil.”

More than 20 other nations have joined the U.S. in ordering the expulsions of Russian diplomats. May said she welcomes “the breadth of international action in response to Russia’s reckless and brazen behavior.”

Russia has denied any involvement in the attack.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow would respond to the U.S.-led moves within a week. He described the expulsion of his countries’ diplomats from Western countries as “boorish anti-Russian behavior” and said colossal blackmail “is now, unfortunately, the main tool of Washington on the international arena.”

Russia’s Ambassador to Australia Grigory Logvinov added Wednesday that if Western countries continue actions against Russia, then the world would be “deeply in a Cold War situation.”

VOA’s Jeff Seldin and Steve Herman contributed to this report.
…

Israel and Iran, with two of the most powerful militaries in the Middle East, appear on a collision course that some experts fear could ignite a regional war that might ultimately drag in the United States and Russia.

The tensions are centered in Israel’s northern neighbor Syria, where both Russia and Iran have been emboldened by their success in shoring up the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The war has occasionally spilled across Israel’s borders, causing alarm in the Jewish state.

“If a Hezbollah missile or mortar shell hits a kindergarten or a school bus — a terror attack that causes major damage in terms of Israeli lives — this would be a tactical incident that entails a strategic price,” predicts Lior Weintraub, a former Israeli diplomat and now a lecturer at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.

“That would be translated into a significant Israeli retaliation and from there you might see a slippery slope.”

Christopher Kozak, a senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, also worries about an incident spinning out of control.

“That’s why I am greatly concerned in the next several months we are going to get, if not a total regional conflagration, then at least a more direct Israel-Iran confrontation on a new third front,” he told VOA.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Lebanese Hezbollah have stationed resources along the eastern Golan Heights and deployed key commanders to the area.

“Jerusalem’s liberation is near,” hardline Iranian cleric Ebrahim Raisi said in January during a tour of the Israel-Lebanon border, where he was flanked by Hezbollah commanders and Iranian officers.

Weintraub says Israel understands there is “only one reason” for Iran to entrench itself Syria, and that is “to build a launching pad for an attack against Israel.”

Some analysts worry that the situation will only get worse if the United States renounces the nuclear non-proliferation deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), between Iran and the international community.

“Beyond allowing Iran to re-initiate a nuclear weapons program, our trashing of the deal would send a signal to Israel that Washington would countenance something as bold as an Israeli military strike on Iran,” Ned Price, a National Security Council spokesman in the Obama administration tells VOA.

“That could well be the spark that sets the region ablaze, with Hezbollah then potentially doing the bidding of Tehran in locales near and far,” says Price, who spent a decade at the Central Intelligence Agency as a senior analyst and then spokesman.

Acknowledging that tension and that “fears have been developing around the worst-case scenario”, Pierre Pahlavi, assistant professor of defense studies at the Royal Military College of Canada, says war is not inevitable.

In February, the Middle East appeared on the edge of a wider war after an Iranian drone was shot down in Israeli airspace and an Israeli fighter jet was hit by anti-aircraft fire from Syria when attacking an Iranian base. Israel retaliated by hitting a dozen more targets in Syria, including four additional purported Iranian military facilities.

Even before those incidents, the International Crisis Group had warned that “a broader war could be only a miscalculation away.”

Pahlavi asserts that “neither Israel nor Iran wants to start a clash that would spiral up.”

In Israel, Weintraub concurs but warns “if the sword would be on Israel’s neck, then Israel will act. And if Israel will act, there’ll be a price for it. But when you fight for your survival, you do what you have to do, and you take what you have to take.”

Last week, Israel openly acknowledged for the first time that it bombed a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007 and suggested the air strike should be a reminder to Tehran it will never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

“The Iranians are absolutely aware that they have no capacity to confront the Israeli forces conventionally,” says Pahlavi, whose great uncle was the last shah of Iran. “I do believe — but maybe it’s wishful thinking, the Iranians will do whatever they have to in order to keep things under control.”

Russia has an effective coalition with Iran in the Middle East while it is also interested in managing its relationship with Israel. That has allowed Moscow generally to turn a blind eye to Israeli actions against Iran inside Syria.

If Russia has to choose between Jerusalem and Tehran, most analysts see Moscow more closely aligning with Iran.

“Do they go all the way to shooting down an Israeli jet? I don’t know if they’d go that far,” says Kozak.

Israelis express confidence they would not need American forces to help fight Iran, but they also do not expect the Trump administration to try to restrain them.

Weintraub notes that it is “very visible to all of the Middle East that the United States stands behind Israel. It means a lot, in terms of national security, for the lives of Israelis. … But I’m not talking about moving one [additional] American soldier onto the soil of the Middle East.”

The United States military intends to keep forces in Syria, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in January, not only for mopping up Islamic State and al-Qaida fighters, but also as a signal to the forces controlled by Damascus and Tehran.

However, analysts say, Washington has effectively outsourced to Moscow the job of enforcing several so-called de-escalation zones in Syria, giving it the upper hand at a time of rising tension between the two countries.

Should any of its forces be hit by U.S. strikes, such as those conducted to punish Syria for chemical attacks, Russia’s military has issued an unprecedented blunt threat.

“If lives of the Russian officers are threatened, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation will retaliate against missile and launch systems,” said Army General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, earlier in March.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone last week. Trump told reporters they discussed the Syrian civil war — which is the world’s deadliest conflict in recent decades — and that the two leaders are looking to meet soon.

Arranging such a summit may prove difficult as the climate of U.S.-Russian relations plunges to its lowest temperature since the Cold War.

Moscow on Monday vowed retaliation after the United States — joined by numerous allies — expelled dozens of its diplomats it considers spies, in response to a nerve gas attack in Britain that is blamed by the West on Russia.

 
…

Europe’s bailout fund on Tuesday approved a 6.7 billion-euro ($8.32 billion) loan installment to Greece as part of its third international rescue program, with payment of the first 5.7 billion euros expected this week.

The European Stability Mechanism said the approval came after the Greek government completed a series of required reforms. The funds will be used to service public debt and clear domestic arrears.

“Today’s decision … acknowledges the hard work by the Greek government and Greek people in completing an extensive set of reforms,” said ESM head Klaus Regling. The reforms were in tax policy, privatizations and the resolution of nonperforming loans, among others.

The ESM said the initial 5.7 billion euros were to be disbursed Wednesday. The remaining 1 billion euros, to be used for clearing arrears, may be disbursed after May 1 if the country “makes progress in reducing its stock of arrears.”

Greece has depended on billions of euros from international rescue loans since 2010, and its third bailout is due to end this summer. In exchange for the money, successive governments have had to implement often painful economic and structural reforms, including tax increases and severe cuts to pensions and public spending.

Regling said he was “confident that Greece is on track to successfully exit the ESM program in August 2018, provided that the remaining reforms are implemented by the Greek government.”

Greece’s financial crisis has wiped out a quarter of the economy and led to persistently high unemployment, which continues to hover above 20 percent. The frequently unpopular reforms have also led to street protests.
…