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Russia says President Vladimir Putin will ask for an explanation this week from U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton when he visits Moscow about President Donald Trump’s intention to pull the United States out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty because of alleged Russian violations of the pact.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Sunday Trump’s action “would be a very dangerous step,” accusing the U.S. of trying to assume “total supremacy” in the world.

The agreement was negotiated in the late 1980s, signed by then U.S. President Ronald Reagan and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It required the elimination of short-range and intermediate-range nuclear and conventional missiles by the United States and Russia.

In announcing the withdrawal, Trump said Saturday, “Russia has violated the agreement. They have been violating it for many years. And we’re not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons and we are not allowed to.”

Trump said the United States will develop the weapons unless Russia and China agree to stop manufacturing their own similar weaponry, although China is not part of the pact.

“If Russia’s doing it and if China’s doing it, and we are adhering to the agreement, that is unacceptable,” Trump said.

Russia has denied violating the treaty.

Britain said it stood “absolutely resolute” with the United States in the dispute, although another American ally, Germany, called Trump’s move “regrettable.”

Gorbachev, now 87, attacked Trump’s action, telling the Interfax news agency, “Is it really so hard to understand that dropping these agreements… shows a lack of wisdom? Getting rid of the treaty is a mistake.”

He said the two countries “absolutely must not tear up old agreements on disarmament. All the agreements aimed at nuclear disarmament and limitation of nuclear arms must be preserved to save life on Earth.”

U.S. officials have previously alleged that Russia violated the treaty by deliberately deploying a land-based cruise missile in order to pose a threat to NATO. Russia has claimed that U.S. missile defenses violate the pact.

Beatrice Fihn, the executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize-winning campaign coalition, said that “by declaring he will leave the INF Treaty, President Trump has shown himself to be a demolition man who has no ability to build real security. Instead, by blowing up nuclear treaties, he is taking the U.S. down a trillion dollar road to a new nuclear arms race.”

Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent Russian political analyst told the Associated Press, “We are slowly slipping back to the situation of Cold War, as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, with quite similar consequences, but now it could be worse because Putin belongs to a generation that had no war under its belt. These people aren’t as much fearful of a war as people of [former Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev’s epoch. They think if they threaten the West properly, it gets scared.”

 
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Catholic bishops are entering their final week of debate over hot-button issues facing young Catholics, including how the church should welcome gays and respond to the clerical sex abuse scandal that has discredited many in the church hierarchy.

The monthlong synod of bishops ends next Saturday with the adoption by the 260-plus cardinals, bishops and priests of a final document and approval of a separate, shorter letter to the world’s Catholic youth.

Some of the youth delegates to the meeting have insisted that the final document express an inclusive message to make LGBT Catholics feel welcome in a church that has often shunned them.

The Vatican took a step in that direction by making a reference to “LGBT” for the first time in its preparatory document heading into the meeting.

But some bishops have balked at the notion, including Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, who insisted in his speech that “there is no such thing as an ‘LGBTQ Catholic’ or a ‘transgender Catholic’ or a ‘heterosexual Catholic,’ as if our sexual appetites defined who we are.”

But other bishops have expressed a willingness to use the language, though it remains to be seen if the final document or the letter will. Each paragraph will be voted on one by one and must obtain a two-thirds majority.

“The youth are talking about it freely and in the language they use, and they are encouraging us ‘Call us, address us this because this is who we are,”’ Papua New Guinea Cardinal John Ribat told a press conference Saturday.

One of those young people, Yadira Vieyra, who works with migrant families in Chicago, said gays often feel attacked and shunned by the church.

“We know that’s not true, any Catholic knows that’s not true,” she said. But she added bishops need to communicate that “the church is here for them.”

Catholic church teaching holds that gays should be loved and respected but that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.”

The Oct. 3-28 synod has unfolded against the backdrop of the clergy sex abuse scandal exploding anew in the U.S., Germany, Poland and other nations. Some conservatives have charged that a gay subculture in the priesthood is to blame, even though studies have shown that gays are not more likely than heterosexuals to abuse.

Many of the young delegates have insisted that the final document address the abuse scandal straight on, and Melbourne Archbishop Peter Comensoli hinted that it would.

“One of the key things that will be important going forward is not just that there might be a word of apology, of recognition and of aiming for better practices, but that there is action associated with that,” he said.

Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich said young people are also demanding accountability and transparency from the church’s leadership, which has been excoriated for having covered-up the abuses of predator priests for decades.

He repeated his call, first made in an interview last week with National Catholic Reporter, for bishops to cede their own authority and allow an external process involving lay experts to investigate them when an accusation against them has been made.

“Lay people want us to succeed. People want us to get this right,” Cupich said. “Yes, there’s a lot of anger out there. But beneath that anger there’s a sadness. There’s a sadness that the church is better than this, and that we should get this right.”
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The vast majority of British firms are poised to implement their Brexit contingency plans by Christmas if there isn’t greater clarity over the country’s exit from the European Union, a leading business lobby group warned Sunday.

The Confederation of British Industry said these could include cutting jobs, adjusting supply chains outside the U.K., stockpiling goods, and relocating production and services overseas.

Fear of no deal

The warning comes amid growing fears that Britain may crash out of the EU in March without a deal on the future relationship. That could see tariffs placed on British exports, border checks reinstalled, and restrictions imposed travelers and workers — a potentially toxic combination for businesses.

“The situation is now urgent,” said Carolyn Fairbairn, the CBI’s director general. “The speed of negotiations is being outpaced by the reality firms are facing on the ground.”

Discussions between the two sides have hit an impasse largely over how to maintain an open border between EU member Ireland and Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom.

Christmas deadline

A summit of EU leaders last week failed to yield a breakthrough and another gathering in November was canceled. December is now the next scheduled summit, leaving the Brexit process tight ahead of Britain’s official departure date. Even if a deal is forged, there are doubts over British Prime Minister Theresa May’s ability to secure the necessary majority in Parliament given bitter divisions on the topic.

“Unless a Withdrawal Agreement is locked down by December, firms will press the button on their contingency plans,” Fairbairn said. “Jobs will be lost and supply chains moved.”

Fairbairn’s warning was based on a survey of 236 member firms tilted toward small- and medium-sized companies with up to 500 employees, undertaken from Sept. 19 to Oct. 8. The survey found that 82 percent of firms will have started to implement contingency plans by December if the Brexit process isn’t any clearer.

Negative impact

The CBI also said that 80 percent of firms say Brexit has already had a negative impact on their investment decisions, more than double the 36 percent recorded a year ago. The survey found that 66 percent of businesses said Brexit has had an impact on the attractiveness of the U.K. as a place to invest, while 24 percent said there had been no impact.

Some big companies are becoming increasingly vexed by the impasse in the Brexit talks. Last week, ahead of the summit in Brussels, pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca and carmaker Ford issued statements raising doubts about their investments in Britain.

“Uncertainty is draining investment from the U.K.,” said Fairbairn. 
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France and Germany are condemning the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside his country’s consulate in Istanbul. 

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called Saturday for an “exhaustive and diligent investigation to establish exactly who was responsible” for Khashoggi’s death. Le Drian also said “those guilty of the murder” must be held accountable for their actions.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said in a joint statement Saturday that they condemned the death “in the strongest possible terms.” They went on to say “we expect transparency from Saudi Arabia” regarding the details of Khashoggi’s death and called the available information on the incident “insufficient.”

Explanation required

“Nothing has been explained so far,” Merkel said, “and we need to explain it.”

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said Saturday that the circumstances around Khashoggi’s death were deeply troubling, and she called for a thorough, credible and transparent investigation.

The statements came in response to Saudi Arabia’s announcement that Khashoggi, who has been missing since entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, died inside the compound after “discussions” between him and people he had met inside the consulate turned into a fistfight.

Saturday’s comments were the first admission by the Saudi government that Khashoggi had died. 

President Donald Trump, who was at a campaign-style rally in Nevada on Saturday, told reporters he was not satisfied with the Saudis’ explanation of what happened to Khashoggi. He added that it was possible Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had been unaware of the death.

Rights group Amnesty International called on Saudi Arabia to “immediately produce” Khashoggi’s body so an autopsy could be performed.

Amnesty’s director of campaigns for the Middle East, Samah Hadid, said the Saudi version of events could not be trusted. She said a U.N. investigation would be necessary to avoid a “Saudi whitewash” of the circumstances surrounding Khashoggi’s death. 

Hadid said such a cover-up might have been done to preserve Saudi Arabia’s international business ties.

Earlier Saturday, a statement from the Saudi public prosecutor carried by Saudi state TV said 18 Saudi nationals had been arrested so far in connection with Khashoggi’s death. The statement also said royal court adviser Saud al-Qahtani and deputy intelligence chief Ahmed Assiri had been fired from their positions.

No cover-up, Turkey pledges

A senior official in Turkey’s ruling party said Saturday that Ankara would never allow a cover-up of the death. 

Numan Kurtulmus, deputy head of the Justice and Development Party, said Turkey would share “conclusive evidence and findings” after an investigation was complete. “It’s not possible for the Saudi administration to wiggle itself out of this crime, if it’s confirmed,” Kurtulmus said.

Turkish officials had said they believed Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, was killed in the Saudi Consulate after he entered the building to collect paperwork for his scheduled wedding. Saudi Arabia had previously denied the allegations and said Khashoggi left the building shortly afterward.

Late Friday, the White House released a statement acknowledging “the announcement from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that its investigation into the fate of Jamal Khashoggi is progressing and that it has taken action against the suspects it has identified thus far.”

When asked about the Saudi announcement, Trump, who was holding a campaign-style rally in Arizona, told reporters, “It’s a big first step.” However, he said, “We do have some questions” for the Saudis, and added, “We’ll be working with Congress.”

He said he wanted to talk to the Saudi crown prince before the next steps were taken.

When asked whether the Saudis could produce a credible report about the killing of Khashoggi, Trump said, “We’re involved. Turkey is involved. … This has been a horrible event. It has not gone unnoticed.”

Before the Saudi announcement, Trump told reporters Friday that he might consider sanctions against Saudi Arabia over the disappearance of Khashoggi. 

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo discussed Khashoggi’s disappearance during an interview Friday with VOA contributor Greta Van Susteren.

Trump had warned there would be “very severe” consequences if it was learned that Saudi Arabia was behind the disappearance of the journalist, but Pompeo said, “I’m not going to get into what those responses might be. We’ll certainly consider a wide range of potential responses, but I think the important thing to do is that the facts come out.”

Pompeo, who traveled to Riyadh earlier this week to speak to King Salman and the crown prince, told VOA, “I made very clear to them that the United States takes this matter very seriously. That we don’t approve of extrajudicial killings. That we don’t approve of that kind of activity. That it’s not something consistent with American values, and that it is their responsibility as this incident happened in the consulate.

“It’s their responsibility to get to the bottom of this, to put the facts out clearly, accurately, completely, transparently, in a way that the whole world can see,” Pompeo said. “And once we’ve identified the fact set, then they have the responsibility and the first instance to hold accountable those inside the country that may have been involved in any wrongdoing.”
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Thousands of protesters gathered in central London on Saturday to call for a new referendum on Britain’s departure from the European Union.

Organizers want the public to have a final say on the government’s Brexit deal with the EU, arguing that new facts have come to light about the costs and complexity of Britain’s exit from the bloc since Britons voted to leave in 2016.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan from the opposition Labor Party was among those set to address the People’s Vote March, which will culminate at a rally in Parliament Square.

Organizers have brought in some 150 buses to ferry thousands of activists from across the country to the British capital.

Those in favor of pulling Britain out of the EU won by 52 percent in the 2016 EU membership referendum. Prime Minister Theresa May of the Conservative Party has ruled out another public vote on the subject.

Britain is scheduled to leave the EU on March 29, but negotiations have been plagued by disagreements, particularly over the issue of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It will be the U.K.’s only land border with the EU after Brexit, for Ireland is part of the EU, and Northern Ireland is part of the U.K.

There are growing fears of a “no-deal” British exit, which could create chaos at the borders and in both the EU and the British economies.

May, speaking at an inconclusive EU summit in Brussels this week, said she would consider having a longer post-Brexit transition period — one that could keep Britain aligned to EU rules and obligations for more than two years after its March departure. Pro-Brexit politicians in Britain, however, saw it as an attempt to bind the country to the bloc indefinitely.

“This week’s fresh chaos and confusion over Brexit negotiations has exposed how even the best deal now available will be a bad one for Britain,” said Andrew Adonis, a Labor member of the House of Lords. “Voters will neither forgive nor forget if [lawmakers] allow this miserable Brexit to proceed without people being given the final say.”

 
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Macedonia’s parliament has approved a proposal to change the country’s name, a move that could pave the way for it to join NATO and the European Union.

Eighty members of parliament in the 120-seat body voted in favor of the measure Friday to rename the country North Macedonia, just surpassing the two-thirds supermajority needed to enact constitutional changes.

Parliament was forced to address the issue after a September referendum on the matter failed to achieve the turnout threshold of 50 percent.

According to election officials, only about a third of eligible voters cast ballots in the September referendum. However, they said more than 90 percent of those voting cast ballots in favor of changing the country’s name to North Macedonia. Conservatives in Macedonia strongly oppose the name change and boycotted the referendum.

Macedonians are being asked to change the name of their country to end a decades-old dispute with neighboring Greece and pave the way for the country’s admission into NATO and the EU.

Athens has argued that the name “Macedonia” belongs exclusively to its northern province of Macedonia and that using the name implies Skopje’s intentions to claim the Greek province.

The two countries agreed on the name change in June.

Greece has for years pressured Skopje into renouncing the country’s name, forcing it to use the more formal moniker Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in the United Nations. Greece has consistently blocked its smaller neighbor from gaining membership in NATO and the EU as long it retained its name.

The process for Macedonia’s parliament to fully change the country’s name is lengthy and will require several more rounds of voting.
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U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton will meet Saturday in Moscow with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, amid reports that Washington will tell Russia it plans to quit a landmark nuclear weapons treaty.

The visit comes ahead of what is expected to be a second summit between presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump this year.

Bolton, who will also meet Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, announced the visit to Moscow in a tweet, saying he would “continue discussions that began in Helsinki,” referring to a summit held in July.

The New York Times said the Trump administration plans to inform Russian leaders in the coming days that it is preparing to leave the three-decade-old Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, known as the INF.

The newspaper said the U.S. accuses Russia of violating the deal, signed in 1987 by president Ronald Reagan, by deploying tactical nuclear weapons to intimidate former Soviet satellite states that are now close to the West.

US-Russia ties are under deep strain over accusations that Moscow meddled in the 2016 presidential election, as well as tension over Russian support for the Syrian government in the country’s civil war, and the conflict in Ukraine.

However, Washington is looking for support from Moscow in finding resolutions to the Syria war and putting pressure on both Iran and North Korea.

No new summit between Trump and Putin has been announced, but one is expected in the near future.

The two leaders will be in Paris on Nov. 11 to attend commemorations marking the end of World War I.

A senior Trump administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said another potential date would be when the presidents both attend the Group of 20 meeting Nov. 30-Dec. 1.

“There are a couple possibilities, including the G-20 in Buenos Aires or the Armistice Day parade in Paris. At the G20 is probably more likely,” the official said. “President Trump’s invitation to Putin to visit Washington, D.C., still stands.” 
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U.S. intelligence, law enforcement and security agencies are warning that Russia is persistently targeting the country’s upcoming midterm elections. They laid out the latest evidence in new charges against a Russian national connected to the oligarch known as “Putin’s cook.”

The U.S. on Friday unsealed the criminal complaint against Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, 44, of St. Petersburg, making her the first Russian charged in connection with interference in the 2018 election.

According to the criminal complaint, Khusyaynova was the chief accountant for a Russian effort dubbed “Project Lakhta,” a self-described “information warfare” operation run by the Internet Research Agency — the same social media troll farm indicted earlier this year by U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his Russia investigation.

Charging documents say Khusyaynova oversaw spending for social media advertisements and promotions and proxy servers as she helped to create thousands of social media accounts on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, some of which generated tens of thousands of followers.

The criminal complaint says Khusyanova was working with a multimillion-dollar budget — money, according to U.S. officials, that came from Russian businessman Yevgeniy Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s cook” because of his catering company’s work for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin is thought to have extensive ties to Russia’s political and military establishments.

Involved in 2018 elections

But unlike previous criminal complaints, U.S. officials said Khusyaynova’s activity extended well beyond the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as she funded efforts to create new social media accounts targeting both issues and candidates, Republican and Democratic, involved the 2018 election, now just a little more than two weeks away.

Like with previous efforts under “Project Lakhta,” all of the accounts were designed to make it appear as though they belonged to actual American political activists, using virtual private networks (VPNs) and other methods to hide their origin. 

U.S. officials also said those running them were told to intensify divisions and distrust between members of all political parties “through supporting radical groups” and to “aggravate the conflict between minorities and the rest of the population.”

Messaging focused on a variety of topics, including immigration, gun control, the Confederate flag and the debate over American football players kneeling for the U.S. national anthem.

Officials said specific incidents, including mass shootings, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., and decisions coming from the Trump White House were also used as fodder.

“The strategic goal of this alleged conspiracy, which continues to this day, is to sow discord in the U.S. political system and to undermine faith in our democratic institutions,” U.S. Attorney Zachary Terwilliger said in a statement.

Asked about the new charges during a visit to Arizona, President Donald Trump called them irrelevant to his efforts.

“It had nothing to do with my campaign,” he told reporters. “If they are hackers, a lot of them probably like [2016 Democratic presidential nominee] Hillary Clinton better than me.”

Warning and reassurance

Friday’s indictment came as U.S. intelligence and security officials sought to both warn and reassure U.S. voters about the upcoming midterm elections.

“We’re not seeing anything anywhere remotely close to ’16,” Chris Krebs, undersecretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s National Protection and Programs Directorate, told reporters Friday following a tabletop election security exercise.

“2016 had a long lead-up of spear-phishing campaigns, compromise of networks,” he said. “We’re not seeing them right now.”

Krebs and other officials have also said there had been no increase in attempts to infiltrate U.S. voting systems, and that no system involved in tallying votes had been compromised.

Many of those systems have been upgraded or hardened, U.S. officials said, noting that more than 90 percent of the country’s election infrastructure was now being monitored by sensors that can detect malicious activity.

But at the same time, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned Friday of persistent efforts by U.S. adversaries to sway voters.

“We are concerned about ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran, to undermine confidence in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment,” ODNI said in a joint statement with the Justice Department, the FBI and DHS.

“These activities also may seek to influence voter perceptions and decision-making in the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections,” the statement said.

U.S. officials say both China and Iran have been increasingly active in their efforts to use influence operations, with current and former officials describing Beijing’s efforts as more sophisticated and more intent on generating a favorable view of China over the long term.

But neither yet compares in scope to the Russian efforts, just some of which were unveiled in the criminal complaint. 

Russian-financed

Financial documents obtained as part of the investigation indicate that as of January 2016, Khusyaynova and “Project Lakhta” were working with a budget of $35 million, spending about $10 million in the first half of 2018 alone.

Khusyaynova’s 2018 expenditures included $60,000 for Facebook advertisements, another $6,000 for ads on Instagram, and $18,000 for “bloggers” and for developing accounts on Twitter.

Russian businessman Prigozhin was the source of the money, according to U.S. officials.

Prigozhin controls Concord Management and Consulting LLC, one of three entities under indictment as part of the Mueller investigation.

A Washington-based lawyer representing Concord did not respond to a request for comment.

Masood Farivar contributed to this report
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A women-to-women investment fund is coming to Britain next month to boost financing for female-owned businesses, its founder said Thursday, as efforts grow to close the gender investing gap.

SheEO has lent more than $2 million to 32 female social entrepreneurs in the United States, Canada and New Zealand to grow their businesses since 2015 in an attempt to address a global gender investment gap.

“Most of the people writing checks and investing are men,” founder Vicki Saunders told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “SheEO wants to fund female innovators with great ideas to create stronger communities and a better world.”

Support for female entrepreneurs

It is the latest venture to support female entrepreneurs around the world, who often face more obstacles than men, including a lack of access to finance, business networks, international markets and role models.

Three out of 10 U.S. businesses are owned by women but they only receive $1 in investment for every $23 that goes to male-led businesses, the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee found in 2014.

A Goldman Sachs-World Bank Group partnership to provide capital to women entrepreneurs in emerging markets reached $1 billion in investments in May.

How it works

SheEO brings together 500 women each year who contribute $1,100 each, which they pool and lend, interest-free, to five women-led businesses of their choice.

The loans are paid back over five years and then loaned out again, creating a perpetual fund that SheEO hopes will grow to $1 billion, with 1 million investors supporting 10,000 women-led ventures.

More than 300 women in Britain wrote to SheEO asking it to launch there, Saunders said ahead of a visit to London where she hopes that 500 female investors will come on board.

Workplace gender equality is in the spotlight in Britain, where just 6 percent of the biggest publicly listed companies are headed by women and pay disparities were revealed at major institutions last year.

Twenty One Toys founder Ilana Ben-Ari, one of the first to get SheEO funding in 2015, said it changed her business, enabling her to push ahead with production and hire staff to help with a stressful workload. Her revenue has now doubled.

“It was easy to get my foot in the door and have a meeting but it was near impossible to have a serious conversation about my business,” she said, describing her efforts to get financing from venture capitalists. “Halfway through that meeting you find out — this isn’t a meeting, this is a date.”
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The United States suspended imports of pork from Poland Thursday because of an outbreak of the highly contagious hog disease African swine fever in that country.

African swine fever has spread rapidly in Eastern Europe and China, the world’s largest pork producer, where new cases are appearing and the disease is traveling far distances.

The United States is free of the disease and eager to keep it that way because infections in U.S. herds would likely kill hogs and limit pork exports.

Humans are not susceptible to African swine fever, according to the USDA.

The agency said it was reviewing Poland’s export protocols after finding one facility there shipped pork to the United States without following requirements designed to prevent the spread of serious livestock diseases. A second Polish facility is also being reviewed, according to a USDA notice.

The USDA is also working with Customs and Border Protection staff to enhance screening of passenger bags coming from Poland, the notice said. The checks aim to ensure restricted products are not brought into the country.
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Computer giant IBM Corp., financial services company Western Union

Co. and European police launched a project Thursday to share financial data that  they said may one day be able to predict human trafficking before it occurs.

The shared data hub will collect information on money moving around the world and compare it with known ways that traffickers move their illicit gains, highlighting red flags signaling potential trafficking, organizers said.

“We will build and aggregate that material, using IBM tools, into an understanding of hot spots and routes and trends,” said Neil Giles, a director at global anti-slavery group Stop the Traffik, which is participating in the project.

Data collection, digital tools and modern technology are the latest weapons in the fight against human trafficking, estimated to be a $150 billion-a-year global business, according to the International Labor Organization.

The U.N. has set a goal of 2030 for ending forced labor and modern slavery worldwide, with more than 40 million people estimated to be enslaved around the world.

Certain patterns and suspicious activity might trigger a block of a transaction or an investigation into possible forced labor or sex slavery, organizers said.

The project will utilize IBM’s internet cloud services as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning to compare data and to spot specific trafficking terms, said Sophia Tu, director of IBM Corporate Citizenship.

With a large volume of high-quality data, the hub one day may predict trafficking before it happens, she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“You can’t do it today because we’re in the process of building out that amount of data and those capabilities, but it’s in the road map for what we want to do,” she said.

While law enforcement is teaming up with banks and data specialists to chase trafficking, experts have cautioned that it can be a cat-and-mouse game in which traffickers quickly move on to new tactics to elude capture.

Also, less than 1 percent of the estimated $1.5 trillion-plus laundered by criminals worldwide each year through the financial system is frozen or confiscated, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

Along with IBM and Western Union, participants include Europol, Europe’s law enforcement agency; telecommunications giant Liberty Global; and British banks Barclays and Lloyds, organizers said.
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Several major Russian companies are exploring ways to do deals abroad without using dollars, spurred on by a U.S. threat to broaden sanctions that have impeded access of some Russian firms to the international banking system.

The Kremlin has been pushing companies to conduct more deals using other currencies to reduce reliance on the dollar.

Russian Alrosa, the world’s biggest producer of rough diamonds in carat terms, said it had completed a pilot deal with a Chinese client using yuan in the summer and another non-dollar transaction with an Indian client.

Other companies working on similar transactions include energy firm Surgutneftegaz, agricultural company Rusagro and miner Norilsk Nickel.

Russia’s central bank said this week the amount of non-dollar dealings was growing, with the share of rouble settlements in the Russia-China and Russia-India goods trade now between 10 and 20 percent.

The share was higher in the service industry, it added.

But there are limits to how much business can be shifted.

Major companies still rely heavily on dollar deals and most of Russia’s foreign earnings come from oil sales priced in dollars.

In addition, foreign banks with major U.S. activities may still be wary of business with any entity under U.S. sanctions even if transactions are not in dollars, bankers say.

The United States and its allies imposed sanctions on Russia in 2014 over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. Washington said in August more measures could follow, after accusing Moscow of using a nerve agent against a former Russian agent and his daughter in Britain.

The new steps, which could be announced in November, may target dollar dealings, U.S. lawmakers have said.

Speed helps

One challenge facing companies dealing in the rouble is the Russian currency’s volatility. Between April 6 and 11, after Washington imposed sanctions on Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska and some of his companies, the rouble lost almost 13 percent of its value against the dollar.

Alrosa said it avoided the fluctuation risk by completing the Chinese deal in a day. U.S. dollar deals tend to take longer due to associated compliance checks required.

“An increase in the speed of operations is an advantage in such an operation,” the company said in an emailed statement.

Alrosa did not give a value for its China and India deals but said the Chinese buyer had bought a lot at its auction of diamonds of 10.8 carats or larger in Hong Kong. Alrosa data indicates that its lots are on average worth about $100,000.

Alrosa said the banker for its Chinese deal was Shanghai office of VTB, Russia’s second-largest bank. An industry source, asking not to be named, said Russia’s biggest bank lender Sberbank worked on the Indian deal.

VTB and Sberbank declined to comment.

The Chinese client settled its purchase in yuan, which VTB converted into roubles and transferred to Alrosa.

“We carried out the transaction itself in one day, in several hours,” Alrosa said, adding that on this occasion the currency move was in the client’s favor.

No currency hedging was required because of the speed of the deal, the company said, but the client had to open an account in VTB’s branch in Shanghai to complete the transaction.

Alrosa said it was also considering settlement for future deals in Hong Kong dollars, adding that other Chinese clients had shown interest in non-dollar transactions.

Non-dollar limits

But there are limits on how much of Alrosa’s business can switch to other currencies. China accounts for just 4 percent of its sales, while India accounts for 17 percent.

Among initiatives by other Russian firms, Surgutneftegaz has been pushing buyers to agree to pay for oil in euros instead of dollars, Reuters reported in September.

Russian farming conglomerate Rusagro told Reuters that some of its trading operations were in yuan and said this would increase with the expansion of business with China.

Russian nickel and palladium producer Norilsk Nickel said it was discussing the option of rouble payments with foreign customers which have rouble revenue, although it said it had not secured deals under those terms.
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Hundreds of taxis on Thursday drove at a snail’s pace across the Polish capital Warsaw in protest at the ride-sharing app Uber and other unlicenced competitors.

Other cab drivers gathered in front of the justice ministry to call for legislation to regulate the industry.

Traditional cab operators argue that the Uber app and others like it represent unfair competition because their drivers can dodge the rules and restrictions that regulate professionals.

“There are 12,500 legal taxis in Warsaw and around 8,000 to 9,000 unregistered working for Uber, Taxify and a couple dozen other similar app-based operators,” said Jaroslaw Iglikowski, head of the Warsaw Taxi Drivers union.

“The app-based operators are taking around 30-35 percent of our overall business and up to 70 percent of night-time fares, especially on weekends,” he told AFP.

The protesting cab drivers claim in a petition they gave the justice minister that the country is losing more than 700 million zloty (160 million euros, $190 million) annually in unpaid taxes because of Uber and others like it.

The taxis dispersed in the early afternoon before rush hour, as the drivers had promised they would not cause traffic problems for city residents.

Uber has become one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture-funded startups and has expanded its ride-sharing services to dozens of countries.

It does not employ drivers or own vehicles, but instead relies on private contractors using their own cars, allowing them to run their own business.

The app claims it is a service provider, connecting passengers with these freelance drivers directly and cheaply.

But critics and competitors around the globe say this allows it to flout costly regulations such as stringent licensing requirements for taxi drivers, who undergo hundreds of hours of training.

 
…

President Vladimir Putin hailed new missiles in Russia’s military arsenals but emphasized Thursday that the country would only use its nuclear weapons in response to an incoming missile attack.

Putin emphasized during an international policy forum in Sochi that Russia’s military doctrine doesn’t envisage a preventative nuclear strike. He said Moscow only would tap its nuclear arsenal if early warning systems spotted missiles heading toward Russia, in which case “the aggressor should know that retaliation is inevitable.”

“Only when we become convinced that there is an incoming attack on the territory of Russia, and that happens within seconds, only after that we would launch a retaliatory strike,” he said during a panel discussion at the forum.

“It would naturally mean a global catastrophe, but I want to emphasize that we can’t be those who initiate it because we don’t foresee a preventative strike,” Putin said.

“We would be victims of an aggression and would get to heaven as martyrs,” while those who initiated the aggression would “just die and not even have time to repent,” he added.

The Russian leader also warned that new hypersonic missiles his country developed give it a military edge.

“We have run ahead of the competition. No one has precision hypersonic weapons,” he said. “Others are planning to start testing them within the next 1 to 2 years, and we already have them on duty.”

Another new weapon, the Avangard, is set to enter service in the next few months, he said. Earlier this year, Putin said the Avangard has an intercontinental range and can fly in the atmosphere at a speed 20 times the speed of sound, making it capable of piercing any missile defense system.

His blunt talk Thursday comes as Russia-West relations remain frosty over the Ukrainian crisis, the war in Syria and the allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential vote.

Putin said he still hopes U.S. President Donald Trump will be able to improve the ties between their countries. He thinks Trump wants “some sort of stabilization and improvement of U.S.-Russian ties” and said Moscow is ready for that “at any moment.”

Putin said his meeting with Trump in Helsinki in July was positive and they had a “normal, professional dialogue” even though their exchange brought strong criticism from Trump.

At the same time, the Russian president sharply criticized Washington’s reliance on sanctions against Russia and others, saying the instrument of punishment “undermines trust in the dollar as a universal payment instrument and the main reserve currency.”

“It’s a typical mistake made by an empire,” Putin said. “An empire always thinks that it’s so powerful that it can afford some mistakes and extra costs.”

Building on his defiance and boasts, Putin said Russia had nothing to fear given its defense capability and “people ready to defend our sovereignty and independence.”

“Not in every country are people so eager to sacrifice their lives for the Motherland,” he said.

 
…

Germany has extradited the suspect in the killing of Bulgarian television journalist Viktoria Marinova to Bulgaria, an Interior Ministry official said Wednesday.

Bulgarian Severin Krasimirov is to be charged in person with the rape and murder of 30-year-old Marinova, whose body was found in a park in her Danube hometown of Ruse on Oct 6. Police said she was beaten and raped and died of suffocation.

Prosecutors have said evidence did not indicate Marinova’s death was related to her work and pointed to a random sexual crime although they are still investigating all possibilities.

Krasimirov was arrested in Germany last week where he admitted partial guilt to a German court.

“German authorities have handed over … the 21-year-old citizen of Ruse,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

A German prosecutor confirmed Krasimirov has been extradited via a flight from Frankfurt.
…

Leaders from the European Union and Britain shrugged off a weekend negotiating debacle and previous deadlines Wednesday, giving themselves several more weeks to clinch a friendly divorce deal ahead of their separation. 

After the EU insisted for months that the Wednesday summit was a key meeting to get a deal, its Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said “we need much time, much more time and we continue to work in the next weeks” with his British counterpart.  

British Prime Minister Theresa May also spoke about “working intensively over the next days and weeks” to achieve agreement that avoids a no-deal departure from the bloc on March 29 that could create chaos at the borders and in the economy. A deal must be sealed soon so parliaments have time to give their verdict on it. 

Underscoring the newfound sense of non-urgency, Prime Minister Sebastian Kurz of Austria, which holds the rotating EU presidency, even spoke of the “coming weeks and months” to get a deal and sought to impose a soothing calm. 

“There’s no need to dramatize matters. It’s always the case with negotiations, that in the end there are challenges,” he said. 

May was preparing to address other EU leaders one day after European Council President Donald Tusk implored her to present new ideas for resolving the tricky problem of how to keep the land border between the Republic of Ireland and the U.K.’s Northern Ireland friction-free once Britain no longer is an EU member. 

Tusk advised May that “creative” thinking from Britain was required to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland, the issue that has brought divorce negotiations to a standstill. EU leaders dismissed May’s most recent proposal as unworkable. 

But when the prime minister was asked in the House of Commons earlier Wednesday whether her government’s blueprint for an amicable divorce was dead, May replied: “The answer is no.” 

The summit in Brussels had long been seen as the “moment of truth” in the two-year Brexit process. But after urgent talks on the Irish border ended Sunday without producing a breakthrough, Wednesday’s gathering looked more like a therapeutic bonding session than an occasion to celebrate. 

The timeline for a deal has slipped into November, or even December, when another EU summit is scheduled.

“Today there will be no breakthrough,” said Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite. She said 2 1/2 years after Britain’s Brexit referendum, the country had still not explained clearly how it wants to leave the EU.

“Today, we do not know what they want,” she said. “They do not know themselves what they really want. That is the problem.”

At present the two sides are proposing that Britain remains inside the EU single market and is still bound by its rules from the time it leaves the bloc in March until December 2020, to give time for new trade relations to be set up.

Many suspect that will not be enough time, which has led the EU to demand a “backstop” to ensure there are no customs posts or other controls along the currently invisible border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. 

And there is talk that a transition period for the U.K. to adapt to its new status as a third country could be extended by a year. 

Britain says it has not asked for an extension, but May has not yet come up with proposals for unblocking the Irish border logjam. She is hemmed in by pro-Brexit members of her Conservative Party, who oppose any more compromises with the bloc, and by her parliamentary allies in Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, who insist a solution can’t include customs checks between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K. 

 
…

Newly released Ecuadorian government documents have laid bare an unorthodox attempt to extricate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from his embassy hideaway in London by naming him as a political counselor to the country’s embassy in Moscow.

But the 47-year-old Australian’s new career in international affairs was nipped in the bud when British authorities vetoed his diplomatic status, effectively blocking him from taking up the post in Russia.

The files were made public late Tuesday by Ecuadorian opposition lawmaker Paola Vintimilla, who opposes her government’s decision to grant Assange nationality. They largely corroborate a recent Guardian newspaper report that Ecuador attempted the elaborate maneuver to get Assange to Moscow just before Christmas last year.

Russian diplomats called the Guardian story “fake news,” but the government files show Assange briefly was made “political counselor” to the Ecuadorian Embassy in Moscow and eligible for a monthly salary pegged at $2,000.

Ecuador also applied for a diplomatic ID card, the documents show, but the plan appears to have fallen apart with the British veto.

A letter dated Dec. 21, 2017, from Britain’s Foreign Office said U.K. officials “do not consider Mr. Julian Assange to be an acceptable member of the mission.”

An eight-page memo to Vintimilla summing up the episode noted that Assange’s position as counselor was scrapped a few days later.

WikiLeaks did not return messages. The British Foreign Office and the Russian Embassy in London declined to comment.

Assange’s relationship with Russian authorities has been the subject of intense scrutiny following the 2016 U.S. election, when Russian spies are alleged to have handed WikiLeaks leaked emails from presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign in a bid to help elect her rival, Donald Trump.

Assange has denied receiving the files from the Russian government or backing the Trump campaign, despite a growing body of evidence suggesting he received material directly from Russia’s military intelligence agency and coordinated media strategy with Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr.

Last month, the AP published internal WikiLeaks files showing Assange tried to move to Russia as early as 2010.
…

The White House has announced plans to negotiate separate trade deals with Britain, the European Union and Japan.

“We are committed to concluding these negotiations with timely and substantive results for American workers, farmers, ranchers and businesses,” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said Tuesday.

He added that the White House wanted to “address both tariff and non-tariff barriers and to achieve fairer and more balanced trade.”

As required by law, Lighthizer sent three separate letters to Congress announcing the intention to open trade talks.

He wrote that the negotiations with Britain would begin “as soon as it’s ready” after Britain’s expected exit from the European Union on March 29.

Lighthizer called the economic partnership between the U.S. and EU the “largest and most complex”in the world, noting the U.S. has a $151 billion trade deficit with the EU

Writing about Japan, Lighthizer said it is “an important but still often underperforming market for U.S. exporters of goods,” noting that Washington also has a large trade deficit with Tokyo.

The top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Oregon’s Ron Wyden, cautioned the administration against making what he called “quick, partial deals.” 

“The administration must take the time to tackle trade barriers comprehensively, including using this opportunity to set a high bar in areas like labor rights, environmental protection and digital trade,” he said.

President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on European steel and aluminum exports earlier this year and has threatened more tariffs on cars as a reaction to what he said were unfair deals that put the U.S. at a disadvantage.
…

Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin says the force he felt during a Soyuz emergency landing last week was like having a concrete block on his chest.

Ovchinin and U.S. astronaut Nick Hague spoke separately Tuesday about their frightening experience when an unknown mishap caused their Russian Soyuz to abort its mission 60 kilometers (37 miles) above Kazakhstan.

The spacecraft was on its way to the International Space Station when the emergency lights flashed in the cabin just minutes into the flight.

“There was no time to be nervous because we had to work,” Ovchinin told Russian television. “We had to go through the steps that the crew has to take and prepare for emergency landing … so that the crew is still functioning after landing.”

Ovchinin recalled being violently shaken from side by side as the crew cabin separated from the rocket, followed by a force seven times stronger then gravity as the cabin plunged through the atmosphere, followed by the shock of the parachutes yanking open.

Back home in Houston, Hague told the Associated Press, “We knew that if we wanted to be successful, we needed to stay calm and we needed to execute the procedures in front of us smoothly and efficiently as we could.”

Hague said he and Ovchinin were hanging upside down when the cabin landed back on Earth. They shook hands and cracked jokes.

Neither man was hurt, and an investigation is under way to find out why the rocket failed.

Hague said he is disappointed to be back home instead of walking in space, but he’s happy to be reunited with his wife and their two young sons, and is ready to fly again as soon as NASA gives him the word.

“What can you do? Sometimes you don’t get a vote,” Hague told the Associated Press. “You just try to celebrate the little gifts that you get, like walking the boys to school this morning.”

This was the first aborted Soyuz launch in more than 30 years.

The Russian spacecraft has been the only way to send replacement crews to the International Space Station since NASA retired the space shuttle fleet in 2011.

Two private U.S. companies — Boeing and SpaceX — are working on a new generation of shuttles.
…

Egypt’s president urged Russia on Tuesday to resume direct flights to Egyptian resorts as he discussed ways to bolster ties with Russian officials and lawmakers.

Moscow suspended the flights after a bomb planted by the Islamic State group brought a Russian passenger plane down over Sinai in October 2015, killing all 224 people on board. 

Flights between Moscow and Cairo resumed in April after Egyptian officials beefed up airport security. Talks about restoring direct air travel to Egypt’s Red Sea resorts have dragged on.

Addressing the Russian parliament’s upper house, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi emphasized that restoring the flights was essential for Egypt’s tourism industry.

Following meetings in Moscow with top Russian lawmakers and Cabinet ministers, el-Sissi met over dinner with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi later in the day.

The two leaders have developed a close personal rapport and sought to expand bilateral ties, which have strengthened considerably over the past few years.

El-Sissi is on his fourth trip to Russia since taking office in 2014, and Putin visited Egypt in 2015 and 2017.

Egypt has signed deals to buy billions of dollars’ worth of Russian weapons, including fighter jets and assault helicopters. When Putin visited Cairo last December, officials signed a deal for Russia to build a nuclear power plant in Dabaa. 

Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters that the two presidents will discuss the implementation of the nuclear plant contract, as well as prospects for the resumption of flights to the Red Sea resorts and other issues.

He said that el-Sissi will be offered a presentation of Russian weapons, including those which Egypt has expressed interest in buying.

Ushakov noted that bilateral trade rose by 62 percent last year reaching $6.7 billion and continued to expand at a swift pace this year.

Russian grain exports currently account for about 70 percent of Egypt’s needs, he said

Ushakov added that Putin and el-Sissi will discuss international issues, focusing on the situation in Syria, Libya, Yemen and the Palestinian-Israeli settlement.

Following broader talks Wednesday, the two presidents are set to sign a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty that would further boost Russian-Egyptian ties.

                   
…

Facebook says that anyone who takes out a British political ad on the social media platform will now be forced to reveal their identity, in a bid to increase transparency and curb misinformation.

The company said Tuesday that it will also require disclaimers for any British political advertisements. All the data on the ad buyers will be archived for seven years in a publicly accessible database.

Facebook is already applying a similar system in the United States, which is holding midterm elections this year.

British lawmakers have called for greater oversight of social media companies and election campaigns to protect democracy in the digital age.

A House of Commons report this year said democracy is facing a crisis because data analysis and social media allow campaigns to target voters with messages of hate without their consent.

“While the vast majority of ads on Facebook are run by legitimate organizations, we know that there are bad actors that try to misuse our platform,” Facebook said in a statement. “By having people verify who they are, we believe it will help prevent abuse.”

Facebook said it’s up against “smart and well-funded adversaries who change their tactics as we spot abuse,” but it believes that increased transparency is good for democracy and the electoral process.

 
…

Germany has deported an accomplice of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States to his home country of Morocco.

Mounir al-Motassadeq had spent almost 15 years in prison in Germany before he was deported Monday to Morocco.

German media published photographs of Motassadeq wearing a blindfold and being led by two armed policemen to a helicopter. German officials confirmed he was flown out by plane from Frankfurt airport on Monday evening.

Motassadeq was convicted of helping Mohamed Atta, the alleged pilot of one of the hijacked 9/11 planes, and other suicide pilots to help plot the attacks on New York and Washington. The suicide pilots were part of an al-Qaida cell based in Hamburg, Germany, where Motassadeq also lived.

Motassadeq was found guilty in 2003 of being a member of a terrorist organization and an accessory to the murder of the passengers aboard the four airliners used in the September 11 attacks. His five years of trials in Germany involved multiple appeals, overturned convictions, and reinstated verdicts. In the end, he received the maximum sentence the German court could hand down for the crimes — 15 years in prison.

Motassadeq denied being involved in the 9/11 plot, but admitted to being friends with those who did. He said his actions to send money to the suicide pilots were merely favors for his friends.

Motassadeq was released shortly before completing his 15-year sentence on the condition that he agreed to be deported to Morocco. Germany says it will re-arrest him if he ever returns.
…

One of the first steps taken by Spain’s prime minister after assuming office in June was to order the exhumation of the remains of right-wing military dictator Francisco Franco from a mausoleum in the capital’s outskirts, where they have rested since he died in power a half century ago.

“Democracy cannot dignify a dictator,” Pedro Sanchez, leader of the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), said in justifying the order.

The decision was hailed by leftists, but critics warned that polarizing struggles between traditional conservatives and a new breed of left-wing populists could end five decades of bipartisan continuity since Franco’s death.

Sanchez maintains a razor-thin edge in parliament’s lower chamber through an alliance with hard-left groups and Catalan nationalists. His priorities, he said in an address to last month’s U.N. General Assembly, include raising social spending, fighting climate change and promoting women’s rights.

Elsewhere in Europe, populism has come to be identified with far-right movements whose rhetoric is often associated with the xenophobia and racism that characterized the fascist movements that brought Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to power.

But today’s Spanish populism, says influential opinion columnist Mario Saavedra, is “leftist” and appears rooted in memories of a 1930’s republic that was overthrown by Franco in a bloody civil war.

The republic established after King Alfonso XIII stepped aside in 1931 captured the imagination of European and American intellectuals such as Ernest Hemingway, who based his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls on his experiences there. It brought together the world’s most fashionable utopian ideologies at the time, including communism and anarchist syndicalism. Democratic socialists occupied its presidency.

Historian Javier Arjona draws parallels between the coalition of leftist parties which maneuvered Sanchez into the prime minister’s seat and the radical “Popular Front” that came to power through a disputed election victory in 1936. Government supporters scoff at the comparison and Sanchez accuses conservatives of appealing to the “extreme right” in a bid to regain power.

Regardless, a leftist brand of republicanism seems to be back in vogue. Its purple colors appear at social protests and adorn the jerseys of some soccer clubs. Catalan nationalists and the far-left United We Can party who prop up Sanchez’s government call for restoring a republic and holding a referendum on the future of the monarchy. Burning pictures of King Felipe has become a ritual at separatist rallies in Catalonia.

United We Can, or Unidos Podemos (UP) in Spanish, is led by Pablo Iglesias, a political science professor who merged a new generation of leftists with remnants of the old communist party. His movement harnessed a wave of social discontent that exploded into mass protests during the recent global recession, in which Spain’s unemployment rate topped 25 percent nationally and reached 50 percent among young people.

Disenchanted working-class supporters of Sanchez’s mainstream PSOE turned to UP, which promised to confront corruption on all sides.  

While Spain has largely recovered from the darkest days of the crash, UP continues to win followers by denouncing abusive business practices such as the eviction of low-income tenants from housing estates when they are bought up by foreign “vulture funds.” It also champions an increase in old-age pensions for Spain’s growing senior population.

In unveiling its budget October 11, the Sanchez government announced an agreement between the PSOE and UP on a package that includes a massive increase in public spending, the expansion of public services, new regulations, and a substantial rise in the minimum wage.

Sanchez has also called for changing Spain’s constitution. His justice minister, Dolores Delgado, an outspoken proponent of women’s rights, has said that it needs to be rewritten to make it more gender neutral.

His vice president, Carmen Calvo, has called for curbing press freedoms to counter what she calls a “high volume of half-truths and lies” by conservative media. She has threatened to take legal action against the conservative, pro-monarchy, pro-Catholic newspaper ABC over its published allegations that Sanchez plagiarized his doctoral thesis.  

Some business leaders say they are worried. John de Zulueta, chairman of the Circulo de Empresarios, the Spanish business association, said tax hikes proposed by Sanchez to cover a rise in social spending could depress the markets at a time when the economy is not fully out of recession. The IMF has also criticized Sanchez’s plans to finance deficit spending.

Government spokespersons defend their actions, saying their plan is adjusted to EU budget requirements.

Conservatives are also trying to block Sanchez from satisfying Catalan separatists by granting pardons to Catalan Vice president Oriol Junqueras and other officials who are in prison awaiting trial for plotting an independence bid.

“We have to find a political rather than a judicial solution to the Catalan crisis,” Sanchez said after recent violent protests in Barcelona.

Political analyst Ramon Peralta, a professor at Complutense University of Madrid, said Sanchez “tries to shield his government by wrapping it in popular causes.”

In his U.N. speech, Sanchez highlighted his feminist agenda, boasting that 60 percent of his cabinet are women and pledging “zero tolerance” of sexual harassment.

Feminist leaders, who see Spain’s traditional culture of machismo as toxic to women’s rights, are strongly backing Sanchez despite a scandal in which the justice minister was caught on tape speaking insultingly about the interior minister’s homosexuality.

Sanchez’ moves have been well received by liberals elsewhere in Europe. In a recent editorial, the British newspaper The Guardian said, “exhuming Franco is a necessary step in the final stages of Spain’s historic journey away from authoritarian violence towards enduring democracy.”

But others, including some of the prime minister’s allies, suggest that steps like the exhumation of Franco will simply fan the flames of the extreme right. Since Sanchez announced plans to open Franco’s crypt, visits to the mountaintop mausoleum have risen by 77 percent.

The visitors have included blue-shirted members of the Falange party, who raise their arms in the fascist salute while singing their battle hymn, “Cara al Sol,” or “Face to the Sun.” A new extreme-right party called VOX has threatened to stage mass protests to block the exhumation.

Spanish public opinion is about evenly split. According to a survey in July by polling institute Sigma Dos, about 41 percent support the decision while 39 percent are opposed. 
…

The Lehman Brothers bankruptcy threw the United States into an epoch-defining financial storm. Imagine 300 of them going bust at once.

That, in relative terms, is what Iceland endured a decade ago during its banking crisis, which on this rugged island steeped in myths of gods and giants is now known as “hrunid” – the collapse.

The last in a series of prosecutions of those deemed responsible started this month and the hope is that it will give this country of 330,000 people some closure after years of reckoning and reconstruction. Icelanders have become more cynical about political and business leaders, to the point of drafting a new constitution. The top financial entrepreneurs of a generation have been thrown behind bars and the economy has had to be reinvented more profoundly than most countries affected by the crisis.

“Icelanders experienced the crash as a deep betrayal, not just as a serious economic loss,” says Jon Olafsson, a professor who advises the prime minister on ways to improve trust in the government. “Politicians, businessmen and the media told the public, over and over, that everything was fine and people believed them.”

Everything was not fine. Over the span of one week, 90 percent of the financial sector defaulted.

The collapse of Iceland’s three major commercial banks – which had grown 20-fold over the previous seven years through debt-fueled acquisitions abroad – amounted to the third-largest bankruptcy in modern financial history, according to the Icelandic financial regulator. For the United States, an economy 1,100 times bigger, it would be like if 300 Lehman Brothers defaulted simultaneously, it notes.

An economic depression followed that saw people line up for food aid, an unprecedented sight in this country with a progressive welfare state. Families stockpiled goods from supermarket shelves and thousands emigrated.

Johanna Thorvaldsdottir, a goat farmer, had a mortgage in a foreign currency – a common practice then because of the strength of the local currency and lower interest rates abroad – when the Icelandic krona lost nearly half of its value overnight. The cost of her debt soared.

“I worked every evening, sometimes until midnight,” she says. Had it not been for a crowdfunding campaign, raising $90,000 from donors worldwide, the family estate would have been seized by bank creditors.

“We were lucky,” she says. “Many people were not.”

As big as the shock of the financial crisis was, so was the country’s determination to put things right. It emerged from recession in 2011 as it refocused the economy on tourism and technology, and it has been more aggressive than most countries in going after the culprits of the crisis.

Altogether, 29 men and two women have been sentenced to a combined 99 years of prison, for crimes ranging from insider trading to market manipulation. Six cases are still in the appeals process. By comparison, no top Wall Street executives have been prosecuted in the U.S.

Last week, Hreidar Mar Sigurdsson, the former CEO of Kaupthing Bank, stood trial in the last criminal prosecution related to the financial crisis.

The 48-year old has been sentenced in four prior cases, to a total of seven years in prison. He now stands accused of rigging share prices in his bank two months before it crashed. He denies wrongdoing. While a guilty sentence is unlikely to send him back to prison, as he has already served the maximum time for such crimes, it would help draw a line under the cases, which have dragged on for years.

Sigurdsson began his career at a fish factory in a small town before entering finance, and was during the booming years hailed as a self-made genius.

In some ways, his story reflects that of the country, which in the 1990s embraced the flashy world of finance to attain the wealth that the traditional industries could not provide. The media frequently referred to aggressive entrepreneurs like Sigurdsson as modern-day Vikings raiding foreign shores for acquisitions. In the end, it led to disaster.

Iceland is bent on “learning every lesson from the crisis,” says Iosif Kovras, director of Accountability after Economic Crisis, a research project based in City University-London.

He contrasted Iceland’s approach with that of Ireland, where the crisis was also traumatic but took longer to unfold. The country received a bailout from fellow European nations that took years of reforms to complete.

“It did not prompt the same political urgency,” says Kovras. “Iceland’s apocalyptic crash cleared the way for gathering evidence and data.”

The University of Iceland this month marked the 10-year anniversary of the crash with a symposium hosting over 100 speakers. They ruminated on topics like the crisis’ impact on cardiovascular health, pop-song lyrics, patriarchy and popular protests.

“There is no formula for restoring a peaceful, democratic society,” former President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson said in an evening-long public broadcast reflecting on the events. “Amid the crisis, when the situation was revolution-like, I feared not for the economy but our recovery as a nation.”

Reforms of the financial sector have focused on making it less risky. Already there are those saying the rules should be relaxed to allow for faster growth, as the U.S. did this year. President Donald Trump’s administration eased a 2010 law that had sought to limit risk in the financial sector and protect taxpayers from bailing out banks. Critics including Trump saw it as red tape holding the economy back.

Others suggest that loosening the rules would merely increase the likelihood of a new crisis and that Icelanders already seem to be forgetting the lessons of the crash.

Thorhallur Thorhallsson, who works as a tour guide in the capital, notes the proliferation of building cranes rising from the skyline.

“We are so used to cranes occupying the sky that it was decided to make them our national bird,” he tells a half dozen tourists gathered by the statue of the Norse explorer who is said to have settled the island 1,100 years ago.

“In fact, today, Reykjavik has more building cranes than before the 2008 crash.”
…

Days ahead of a summit once seen as the moment Britain and the European Union would have to reach a Brexit deal, both sides are still staring at each other over the question of the Irish border, refusing to blink.

A flurry of diplomatic meetings over the weekend had raised hopes for an agreement, only to be disappointed by the issue that has dogged the talks for months — how to ensure no hard border is created between the EU’s Ireland and Britain’s Northern Ireland once Brexit happens on March 29.

The EU has proposed keeping Northern Ireland in a customs union to avoid a hard border between it and Ireland. The fear is that such a border could revive tensions between Northern Ireland’s pro-Irish Catholic and pro-U.K. Protestant communities, in which over 3,700 people died over 30 years of “troubles” ending in 1998.

Britain says it will only accept that plan if it is temporary and does not hive Northern Ireland off permanently from the rest of the U.K. in terms of customs arrangements.

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s spokesman James Slack said Monday that negotiations are stuck because the EU “continues to insist on the possibility of a customs border down the Irish Sea,” a move it feels will effectively split up the U.K., which is made up of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The acrimony means it is almost impossible that EU leaders will reach a deal at their summit, which begins Wednesday and had long been pegged as the date an agreement should be reached by. The British and EU parliaments need to approve any deal, a process that could take months ahead of the official exit in March.

“Whether we do this week or not, who knows?” British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt told reporters in Luxembourg where EU foreign ministers are meeting.

If Britain leaves the EU without an agreement on future relations, there could be chaos — tariffs would go up on trade, airlines could no longer have permits to fly between the two sides, and freight could be lined up for miles at the borders as customs checks are restored overnight.

To avoid this, the prospect of an extra meeting in November was raised, but only if there was decisive progress this week.

Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney admitted to being “frustrated” by the delay, saying that apart from Britain, Ireland is the country with most to lose from Brexit.

Coveney suggested that May is reneging on part of its commitment to ensure that no hard border involving lengthy customs checks and controls emerges on the Irish island.

He said Britain agreed in December and again in March that an unpopular “backstop” guarantee would remain in place until a better solution is found, but now appears to only want it used for a limited time.

“A backstop cannot be time-limited. That’s new. It hasn’t been there before,” he said. “Nobody wants to ever trigger the backstop, but it needs to be there as an insurance mechanism to calm nerves that we’re not going to see physical border infrastructure re-emerging.”

Britain denied it is reneging on its December commitment to avoid a hard Irish border. “We don’t resile from the commitments we have made in relation to the backstop,” said May’s spokesman, James Slack.

Like Britain’s Hunt, Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said of a deal: “it seems that this week it will not be possible, but this week is not the end.”

He said that he foresees no problems between Britain and Spain over Gibraltar.

“It’s not a rock in the way,” Borrell said, referring to the nickname of the British territory bordering Spain. He added that the Irish border problem is “more difficult to solve than Gibraltar.”

Slovak Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak said: “There is no reason to panic. There is still time.”

May is under intense pressure from her Conservative Party and its parliamentary allies not to give any more ground in negotiations, especially on the border issue.

May’s political allies, the Democratic Unionist Party, stand ready to scuttle a Brexit deal over the Irish border issue. The party opposes any border customs checks but EU officials say that may be the only way to avoid a hard border.

DUP Brexit spokesman Sammy Wilson said “it is probably inevitable that we will end up with a no-deal scenario” because there was no agreement that would be accepted by Britain’s Parliament.

In Luxembourg, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said he hopes “that in the end good sense will win the upper hand.”

“Time is really pressing now,” Maas warned.
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A Moroccan man convicted of helping Mohamed Atta and the other Hamburg-based Sept. 11 suicide pilots as they plotted their attacks on New York and Washington was deported Monday from Germany to his native country.

Mounir el-Motassadeq, who was convicted of membership in a terrorist organization and accessory to the murder of the 246 passengers and crew on the four jetliners used in the 2001 attacks, was flown by helicopter from a Hamburg prison on Monday morning.

Blindfolded and with his hands and ankles shackled, the 44-year-old was then led by two police officers to another helicopter while other heavily armed police in balaclavas patrolled the area and watched from rooftops.

Authorities wouldn’t comment on the operation for security reasons.

“Mr. Motassadeq will leave the country soon,” Hamburg Interior Ministry spokesman Frank Reschreiter told The Associated Press. “All the necessary procedural steps for this have been ticked off according to plan.”

El-Motassadeq was released shortly before completing his 15-year-sentence on the condition that he agree to be deported to Morocco. That would allow Germany to re-arrest him if he ever returned to the country.

It wasn’t immediately clear what awaited him in Morocco.

El-Motassadeq was convicted of being part of the so-called Hamburg cell, including Atta and fellow Sept. 11 pilots Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah.

German courts ruled that el-Motassadeq was aware the three planned to hijack and crash planes, even though he might not have known specifics of the plot. They said el-Motassadeq helped “watch the attackers’ backs and conceal them” by helping them keep up the appearance of being regular university students paying tuition and rent and transferring money.

El-Motassadeq acknowledged training at an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan, but insisted he knew nothing of his friends’ plans to attack the U.S.

“I swear by God that I did know the attackers were in America,” he shouted in accented German at a sentencing hearing. “I swear by God that I did not know what they wanted to do.”

Originally arrested in Hamburg in November 2001, el- Motassadeq was convicted in 2003 of membership in a terrorist organization and thousands of counts of accessory to murder — taking into account victims on the ground — becoming the first person convicted anywhere on charges related to Sept. 11. He was sentenced to the maximum 15 years in prison.

However, a federal court overturned that verdict in 2004, largely because of a lack of evidence from al-Qaida suspects in U.S. custody, and sent the case back to Hamburg.

After a 2005 retrial, el-Motassadeq was again convicted of membership in a terrorist organization that included Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah. But he was acquitted of being an accessory to murder after the court ruled it didn’t have enough evidence that he knew of the hijackers’ plot.

El-Motassadeq was sentenced to seven years in prison at the time, but was freed in early 2006 until his appeal could be heard.

Later that year, the federal court reversed the Hamburg court’s acquittal of el-Motassadeq on the accessory to murder charges, ruling that the evidence knew the plotters planned to hijack and crash planes. It limited the number of counts, however, to the 246 people killed aboard the airplanes and the 15-year sentence was restored.

 
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative allies lost their absolute majority in Bavaria’s state parliament by a wide margin Sunday, according to projections from a regional election that could cause more turbulence in the national government.

The Christian Social Union was on course to take just over 35 percent of the vote, down from 47.7 percent five years ago, projections for ARD and ZDF public television based on exit polls and a partial vote count indicated.

That would be the socially conservative party’s worst performance in Bavaria, which it has traditionally dominated, since 1950. Squabbling in Merkel’s national government and a power struggle at home have weighed in recent months on the CSU, which has taken a hard line on migration tradition.

There were gains for parties to its left and right. The Greens were expected to win up to 19 percent to secure second place, more than double their support in 2013. And the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, was set to enter the state legislature with around 11 percent of the vote.

The center-left Social Democrats, Merkel’s other coalition partner in Berlin, were on course for a disastrous result of 10 percent or less, half of what the party received in 2013 and its worst in the state since World War II.

The CSU has held an absolute majority in the Bavarian parliament for all but five of the past 56 years and governed the prosperous southeastern state for 61 years.

Needing coalition partners to govern would in itself be a major setback for the party, which only exists in Bavaria and has long leveraged its strength there to punch above its weight in national politics.

“Of course this isn’t an easy day for the CSU,” the state’s governor, Markus Soeder, told supporters in Munich, adding that the party accepted the “painful” result “with humility.”

Soeder pointed to goings-on in Berlin and said “it’s not so easy to uncouple yourself from the national trend completely.”

But he stressed that the CSU still emerged Sunday as the state’s strongest party and a mandate to form the next Bavarian government.

He said his preference was for a center-right coalition — which would see the CSU partner with the Free Voters, a local center-right party that was seen winning 11.5 percent, and possibly also the Free Democrats, who may or may not secure the 5 percent needed to win state parliament seats.

The Greens, traditionally bitter opponents, with a more liberal approach to migration and an emphasis on environmental issues, are another possibility.

Bavaria is home to some 13 million of Germany’s 82 million people.

In Berlin, the CSU is one of three parties in Merkel’s federal coalition government along with its conservative sister, Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, and the Social Democrats.

That government has been notable largely for internal squabbling since it took office in March. The CSU leader, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, has often played a starring role.

Back in Bavaria, a long-running CSU power struggle saw the 69-year-old Seehofer give up his job as state governor earlier this year to Soeder, a younger and sometimes bitter rival.

Seehofer has sparred with Merkel about migration on and off since 2015, when he assailed her decision to leave Germany’s borders open as refugees and others crossed the Balkans.

They argued in June over whether to turn back small numbers of asylum-seekers at the German-Austrian border, briefly threatening to bring down the national government.

Seehofer also starred in a coalition crisis last month over Germany’s domestic intelligence chief, who was accused of downplaying recent far-right violence against migrants.

Seehofer, who has faced widespread speculation lately that a poor Bavarian result would cost him his job, said he was “saddened” by Sunday’s outcome, but didn’t address his own future.

It remains to be seen whether and how the Bavarian result will affect the national government’s stability or Merkel’s long-term future.

Any aftershocks may be delayed, because another state election is coming Oct. 28 in neighboring Hesse, where conservative Volker Bouffier is defending the 19-year hold of Merkel’s CDU on the governor’s office. Bouffier has criticized the CSU for diminishing people’s trust in Germany’s conservatives.

“Clearly the choices of subjects and the debates of recent weeks led to our friends in the CSU being unable to put their successful regional record at the center of their election campaign,” said the CDU’s general secretary, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.

 
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Britain’s former Brexit secretary is urging members of Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet to rebel against her proposed deal with the European Union over the terms of Britain’s departure from the bloc.

David Davis wrote in the Sunday Times that May’s plans for some continued ties with the EU under her Chequers plan is “completely unacceptable” and must be stopped. The fellow Conservative Party member said the time has come for ministers to shoot down May’s plan.

“It is time for the cabinet to exert their collective authority,” he said. “This week the authority of our constitution is on the line.”

May is struggling to build a consensus behind her Brexit plans ahead of a cabinet meeting Tuesday that will be followed by an EU summit Wednesday in Brussels.

If Davis’ call for a rebellion is effective, the cabinet meeting Tuesday would be a likely place for opposition to surface.

Davis and former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson resigned from the cabinet this summer to protest May’s Brexit blueprint. Both have become vocal opponents of her plan, calling it a betrayal of the Brexit vote that would leave Britain in a weakened position.

May also faces obstacles from the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, which has played a crucial role in propping up her minority government in Parliament.

DUP leader Arlene Foster remains opposed to any Brexit plan that would require checks on goods traveling between Northern Ireland and Britain, as some EU leaders have suggested as part of a “backstop” plan.

The Chequers plan has also been questioned by some opposition Labour Party lawmakers, further complicating the prime minister’s hopes of winning parliamentary backing for any Brexit deal she reaches with EU officials.
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