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The International Organization for Migration reports no migrants have died while crossing the Mediterranean Sea over the past 20 days. It adds migrant fatalities in general appear to be on the decline.

The central Mediterranean Sea route from Libya to Italy is much favored by African migrants who risk their lives on smugglers boats desperate to reach Europe. While this route might become a gateway to a better life for some, it also is notorious for taking the lives of many.

The International Organization for Migration reports a total of 2,410 Mediterranean Sea fatalities so far this year. IOM spokesman Leonard Doyle says it is remarkable to go without a single reported death for 20 days. He acknowledges it is very hard to know exactly why.

“The flows from Libya have diminished.  If you recall in July, there were days when 3,000 people were picked up in one weekend. You remember that. Now, we have very, very few. So, something is happening. We are not sure what is behind it all. We see somewhat of a decline of migrant flows coming in from Niger, but not enough to justify or to explain why the flows across the Mediterranean have gone down,” Doyle said.

IOM data show the number of fatalities on the Mediterranean Sea generally has declined. Just 19 deaths have been recorded across the region this month, which is a sharp drop from the 689 recorded in August 2015 and 62 the same month last year.

Doyle says no deaths for 20 days might be a cause for celebration. He warns, though, this number can easily go up as smugglers continue to prey on vulnerable migrants, risking their lives while exploiting them for profit.
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Public sentiment on unauthorized immigration continues to sour across Europe, prompting authorities to respond with decisive, sometimes violent, action.

An example occurred last week in Rome, when Italian police forcibly evicted hundreds of refugees from a building near the Piazza Indipendenza.

Police used water cannon and beat people with batons, resulting in 13 people being treated for injuries at the scene and four hospitalizations, according to Doctors Without Borders in Italy. The force was necessary, police said, to defend themselves against rocks and gas canisters hurled by the refugees.

Following an international outcry, Rome’s city council said Friday it will allow 40 refugees — mostly children, elderly and people with disabilities — to stay in the building for six months; but, hundreds of others remain homeless, and thousands of recent arrivals throughout Italy continue to struggle to integrate with the society.

Violent eviction

An evictee interviewed by VOA’s Amharic Service described the chaotic scene as police forced refugees out of the building.

“I was running with everyone, and I was in front of the men so that they wouldn’t beat them, and then two police hit me,” she said.The woman says she was beaten on her hands, back and torso as she tried to protect another evictee.

“And then they hit me on my head, and I didn’t know what was going on,” she says. “When I tried to run, I got dizzy and fell because of the spraying water.”

An estimated 800 people, mostly Eritreans and Ethiopians, were living inside the building, and most fled when authorities arrived. Several hundred people stayed outside to protest, and about 100 people, mostly women, children and those with disabilities, remained inside. They were cleared out by authorities at 6 a.m. local time the following day.

Police said those evicted were illegally squatting. Immigrants had been occupying the building since 2013.

Calls for accountability

“Italian authorities need to ask hard questions about this shocking eviction and, in particular, whether the force used by police was necessary and proportionate,” said Judith Sunderland, associate director for Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division. “Using police in riot gear to force vulnerable people out of their homes with little warning and nowhere to go is just about the opposite of how things should be handled,” she said.

Laetitia Bader, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said Italian courts had first ordered the eviction in December 2016, and the refugees had been warned that it would take place five days prior to the police action.

The temporary housing offered by authorities, however, was considered substandard by the refugees and far from the city center, Bader said, adding that the government has a legal responsibility to provide housing to the displaced.

“Our concern is both that the notification was very abrupt [and] that [insufficient]… accommodation has been offered to these individuals,” she told VOA. “It’s absolutely key that the government looks into and investigates the abusive police action.”

Negative sentiment

In Italy, public opinion toward refugees has grown increasingly hostile.

According to research published by Pew last September, 53 percent of Italians think diversity makes their country a worse place to live, and 77 disapprove of the EU’s handling of refugees. Sixty percent of Italians think refugees will increase domestic terrorism.

Politicians across the country have seized on this sentiment, often running on overtly anti-immigrant platforms. In June, center-right parties were decisive in local races, winning mayoral elections in 15 cities, according to The Guardian newspaper.

Italy’s burden and responsibility

Italians have seen record numbers of refugees reach their shores in recent years. At the end of 2016, Italy hosted nearly a quarter million “persons of concern,” including about 150,000 refugees and about 100,000 asylum-seekers, according to the U.N.’s refugee agency.

Despite its prominence as a point of entry into Europe, Italy hosts fewer persons of concern than both France, where more than 300,000 refugees live, and Germany, home to nearly 700,000 refugees and well over a half-million asylum seekers.

Italy has 20 million fewer people than does Germany, but hosts three times fewer persons of concern per capita.

It’s also processing far fewer asylum-seekers. In 2015 and 2016, 45 percent of asylum applications were handled in Germany, compared to 8 percent in Italy.

Within the country, some regions have been far more active in hosting refugees. Last summer, Italian newspaper La Stampa reported that just a quarter of the country’s 8,000 municipalities currently host migrants on humanitarian grounds.

In Rome, an Ethiopian woman interviewed by VOA’s Amharic Service last Friday said many of those evicted from the building are now sleeping on the streets.

She said they plan to continue protesting their treatment by Italian police. “They don’t have any respect for us. They think black people are flies and donkeys, and they are saying, ‘We don’t care if you die,'” she said.
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Middle-class cocaine users are turning a blind eye to the link between their drug habit and sex trafficking, slavery and murder, said the former head of UK drug strategy.

“These are middle-aged, middle-class people at dinner parties,” Tony Saggers, former head of drugs threat at the National Crime Agency, told The Times on Tuesday, in his first interview since leaving the post.

“They will find sweatshops abhorrent, slave labor a brutal, terrible thing to be happening in their neighborhood, and the news that a 16-year-old has been knifed to death in London will shock them,” he added.

Britain has one of the highest rates of cocaine use in Europe, according to the European Commission and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) with 4.2 percent of young adults having taken the drug in 2015.

Saggers said this was funding the exploitation of women in the sex industry, as well as slavery and gun violence.

“The consequences of buying cocaine are more abhorrent than most of what the people using it find abhorrent,” he said.

In Britain, there are an estimated 13,000 victims of forced labor, sexual exploitation and domestic servitude, most of them from Albania, Nigeria, Poland and Vietnam.

Saggers said there was a lack of action among employers in tackling the prevalence and acceptance of cocaine use in some industries, particularly among banks and other companies in the City of London, Britain’s financial center.

Companies should address the problem through schemes that educate their staff about the impact of cocaine abuse on their health and wider society, he added.

Tamara Barnett, projects leader at the Human Trafficking Foundation, said “we need to do all we can to emphasize the role the public can play in eradicating human trafficking.”

“Highlighting the exploitation and abuse behind certain drug production could make some people think twice before they purchase drugs, or at least twice before boasting about doing something that has for too long been seen just as a fashionable lifestyle choice,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In 2015 a report by the National Police Chiefs’ Council found that commercial cultivation of cannabis was used to fund human trafficking.
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Poland said on Monday that the legislative process overhauling its judiciary is in line with European standards and called the European Commission’s concerns about rule of law in the country groundless.

On July 26, the Commission said it would launch legal action against Poland over the reforms and gave Warsaw a month to respond to concerns that the process undermines the independence of judges and breaks EU rules.

Last month, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed into a law a bill giving the justice minister the power to replace heads of ordinary courts, but after mass street protests blocked two other bills.

The vetoed bills would have empowered the government and parliament to replace Supreme Court judges and most members of a high-level judicial panel.

“In response … the Polish side emphasized that the legislative process which has the primary goal of reforming the justice system is in line with European standards and answers social expectations that have been growing for years, therefore the Commission’s doubts are groundless,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

The ministry also said that “in the spirit of loyal cooperation” it has provided the European Commission with all necessary information on the situation in Poland.

Poland’s right-wing, eurosceptic government says the reforms are needed to streamline a slow, outdated legal system and make judges more accountable to the people. It has already tightened control of state media and took steps that critics said politicized the constitutional court.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin was in Hungary for the second time this year on Monday, attending the World Judo Championships in Budapest and discussing mutual energy interests with his Hungarian counterpart. 

Putin, who made an official trip to Hungary in February, sat in a VIP box at the Laszlo Papp Budapest Sports Arena with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and other officials.

Discussions between the two leaders centered on energy issues, including Russia’s construction of new reactors for Hungary’s Soviet-built nuclear power plant and Hungarian imports of natural gas from Russia.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said the expansion of the power plant in Paks, in central Hungary, would begin next year, after what he said had been a 22-month delay while the European Union examined the project’s compliance with EU rules.

“The procedures regarding the European Union have taken longer than expected and they have taken longer than they should have,” Szijjarto said after dining with Orban and the Russian delegation. “The real construction work will start in January and nothing will stop the investment from now on.”

Szijjarto also said that Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary would upgrade parts of their natural gas pipelines to allow the transport of up to 10 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to the region by the end of 2019.

Critics voice opposition

Hungarian opposition parties protested Putin’s trip amid concerns that Orban has become too close to the Russian leader. Orban used to be highly critical of Russian influence in the region.

Activists from the Together party blew whistles as Putin’s motorcade arrived at the arena and held up a banner in the stands reading “We Won’t Be A Russian Colony” before police escorted them out of the building.

A few supporters of Momentum, a new party whose recent campaign led Budapest to withdraw its bid for the 2024 Olympic Games, donned Putin masks and wore T-shirts with the slogan “Let’s go freedom of speech, let’s go Hungarians.”

Critics say the nuclear project is rife with corruption risks and increases Hungary’s dependency on Moscow.

“Putin is looking for colonies in the former Soviet bloc, not allies,” political activist Gabor Vago said. “Only Russia benefits from the nuclear deal, which ties Hungary for decades to an obsolete technology.”

Russia has loaned Hungary 10 billion euros ($11.9 billion) for the nuclear development plan, an amount expected to cover about 80 percent of the costs.
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The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is urging U.S. President Donald Trump to stop his attacks on the press, saying they “degrade” the essential role of the media in a democracy.

The OSCE’s media freedom representative, Harlem Desir, Monday said Trump’s comments about the media are “deeply problematic,” adding that such statements, especially those identifying the media as “the enemy of the people,” could make journalists more vulnerable to being targeted with violence.

“I urge the United States administration to refrain from delivering such attacks on the media,” said Desir in a letter addressed to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Desir highlighted remarks Trump made last week in Phoenix, Arizona in which the president accused the media of being “truly dishonest,” “fake,” “crooked,” and of making up stories and deepening divisions within the country.

Desir said the comments are “particularly worrying given the United States’ long-standing position as one of the global leaders in defending free speech and press freedoms.” He said the media play a key role in democracies to hold governments accountable and to offer a platform for diverse voices.

The Vienna-based OSCE monitors security and election issues across the group’s 57 member states, including Europe, much of central Asia, Russia and the United States.

Trump has popularized use of the term “fake news” to criticize news media and reporters that he contends treat him unfairly.

A poll released last week by Quinnipiac University found that the majority of Americans agrees with Trump: 55 percent of voters said they disapprove of the way in which the news media report on Trump, compared to 40 percent who approve.

An even larger number of voters – 62 percent – said they disapprove of Trump’s negative comments about reporters and their employers. Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said they agree with Trump on such issues.
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More than 1,000 people have participated in protests in Romania’s capital and other cities to show opposition to against proposed changes to the judicial system.

Demonstrators gathered outside government offices in Bucharest on Sunday called the ruling Social Democratic Party “the red plague” and yelled “A government of thieves and Mafioso!”

People took to the streets in half a dozen cities around the country to protest the proposals submitted by Justice Minister Tudorel Toader.

Toader recommended having the president no longer appoint the general prosecutor and the chief anti-corruption prosecutor, a main function of Romania’s presidency.

He also suggested a process to punish prosecutors and judges for erroneous rulings and prosecutions.

Romanian President Klaus Iohannis has criticized the proposal. Protesters said it would slow efforts to root out corruption.
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Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama has named a restructured Cabinet with a goal of increasing the country’s economic growth from 3.8 to 5 percent in four years.

Rama on Sunday told his Socialist Party leadership that his Cabinet would be reduced from 20 to 14 ministerial posts, making it “a smaller but more cooperative one.”

The new structure merges the finance ministry with the economy ministry, and the energy ministry with the transport and infrastructure ministry. A new ministerial post has been created to oversee the Albanian diaspora and to coordinate with businesses.

Most of the appointees are holdovers from the previous government, but serving in different positions. Four are new appointments. The new Cabinet preserves an equal number of women and men.

The left wing Socialists secured a second mandate in a June election, winning 74 seats in the 140-seat parliament and can run the government without allies.

The opposition Democratic party won 43 seats while the Socialist Movement for Integration Party that was in Rama’s governing coalition in the previous mandate secured 19 seats. Four other seats were won by a smaller political grouping.

The Democrats said the Cabinet picks represented “the return to power of the former communist elite” that would lead to “deepening Edi Rama’s and a small group’s private reigning.”

Rooting out corruption, fighting drug trafficking, improving pay and lowering unemployment are some of the key issues in Albania, a NATO member since 2009 that wants to launch membership negotiations with the European Union next year.

The new Cabinet will be subject to a vote when parliament convenes early next month.
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A Jordanian official said Sunday that Jordan is negotiating with Germany over the legal status of German troops to be stationed in the kingdom, amid reports that disagreements delayed deployment.

The German magazine Der Spiegel reported that Germany seeks immunity in Jordan for 250 soldiers who are part of the U.S.-led campaign against Islamic State group extremists. The report says Jordan balked at the demand.

The Jordanian official said talks with Germany are “subject to international diplomatic rules” and “equal mutual treatment.” He demanded anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters on the issue.

Germany’s Defense Ministry played down the report saying the negotiation process is ongoing and that “we are in fruitful talks with Jordan.”

“We already started the deployment… and are expecting to be fully operational by October,” said a spokesman for the German Defense Ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with department policy.

Germany chose Jordan after previous host Turkey prevented German lawmakers from visiting the troops there.
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The Islamic State news agency Aamaq has claimed the Brussels attacker who assaulted three soldiers with a knife as an Islamic State group soldier.

In a statement Sunday, it said he carried out the Friday evening attack in response to calls to target countries of the coalition that is fighting IS.

Belgian prosecutors have opened an attempted terrorist murder probe after attacker assaulted the soldiers while shouting “Allahu akbar!” — Arabic for “God is great.” He was shot dead by troops.

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office said the man was known to police for assault charges but had no previous terror-related offenses.  The suspect, a Belgian citizen of Somali origin, was also carrying a fake firearm and copies of the Quran.

IS often claims attacks by people who have no known link to the group.
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Britain’s main opposition Labour Party is announcing a policy shift which opens the possibility of the country remaining in the European Union’s single market and customs union for several years as part of a “soft” Brexit, a spokesman said on Saturday.

The party would propose the same “basic terms” as Britain’s current relationship with the EU during a transition period following Brexit in 2019, and after that for all options to be open, a spokesman for Labour said.

His comments came in response to a report in Britain’s Guardian and sister newspaper Observer in which shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer backed “continued membership of the EU single market beyond March 2019, when Britain leaves the EU,” so that Labour would become the party of a “soft Brexit” and offer a smoother economic outcome.

Jeremy Corbyn’s party would also “leave open the option of the UK remaining a member of the customs union and single market for good, beyond the end of the transitional period”, the paper said.

However, a longer-term arrangement would only be considered if a Labour government could by that point have persuaded the rest of the EU to “agree to a special deal on immigration and changes to freedom of movement rules,” the paper said.
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Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who is also a former governor of Ukraine’s Odesa region, has accused the authorities of Georgia and Ukraine of planning to accuse of planning a coup in Georgia.

Saakashvili wrote on Facebook on Saturday that the Georgian authorities “in complete coordination with officials in Ukraine” were planning to make the accusation soon.

“They promised [Ukrainian President Petro] Poroshenko that they would file the charges before September 10,” he wrote.

Saakashvili said the charges would give Ukrainian authorities “a legal basis” for detaining him if he entered Ukraine.

He added that the charges were risible and politically motivated.

Earlier the same day, Nika Gvaramia, the head of Georgia’s Rustavi-2 television, said he believed charges of plotting a coup might be filed against Saakashvili.

Background

Saakashvili, 49, once a lauded pro-Western reformist, served two terms as Georgia’s president, from January 2004 to November 2013.

His popularity declined toward the end of his second term, in part because of a five-day war with Russia during which Moscow’s forces drove deep into the South Caucasus country, and his long-ruling party was voted out of power in a 2012 parliamentary election.

In 2015, Saakashvili forfeited his Georgian citizenship by accepting an offer from his old college friend, Poroshenko, to become governor of Ukraine’s southwestern Odessa Oblast province — a post that required Ukrainian citizenship.

Saakashvili, who harbors Ukrainian political ambitions, resigned as governor of Odessa in November 2016, complaining of official obstruction and corruption. He accused Poroshenko of dishonesty and said his central government had sabotaged democratic reforms required for membership to the European Union and NATO.
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A man who assaulted police officers with a four-foot sword outside Queen Elizabeth’s Buckingham Palace residence shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) was being questioned by counterterrorism police on Saturday.

Two unarmed officers suffered slight cuts as they detained the man, who drove at a police van on Friday evening, then took the sword from the front passenger foot-well of his car, London’s Metropolitan Police said.

It was too early to say what the man was planning to do, said Commander Dean Haydon, the head of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command.

“We believe the man was acting alone and we are not looking for other suspects at this stage,” he said. “It is only right that we investigate this as a terrorist incident at this time.”

Europe has been on high alert following a string of militant attacks, including four this year in Britain which killed 36 people. The country’s threat level remains at severe, meaning an attack is highly likely.

No members of the royal family were present in the palace, which is a magnet for tourists in Britain’s capital in the peak August holiday weekend.

“I want to thank the officers who acted quickly and bravely to protect the public last night demonstrating the dedication and professionalism of our police,” Prime Minister Theresa May said in a message on Twitter.

Suspect from Luton

The suspect was initially arrested on suspicion of grievous bodily harm and assault on police. He was then further arrested under Britain’s Terrorism Act.

Police said they were investigating a 26-year-old man from the Luton area, an ethnically diverse town 55 km (35 miles) north of London where police have carried out investigations linked to other militant attacks, including one earlier this year on London’s Westminster Bridge.

“My partner saw a sword (…) as well as a policeman with blood on him, looking like his hand or chest was injured. The police officer had it in his hand, walking away with it,” said an unnamed witness quoted by The Times newspaper, who said tourists were running away from the scene.

“Something happened before, which is why the people ran away. I’m not sure what this was. But people were already scared and I saw the policeman pull the man from the car” the witness said.

The suspect was treated at a London hospital for minor injuries, and there were no other reported injuries.

“This is a timely reminder that the threat from terrorism in the UK remains severe,” Haydon added. “The police, together with the security services, are doing everything we can to protect the public and we already have an enhanced policing plan over the Bank Holiday weekend to keep the public safe.”
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The EU’s commissioner for migration says Brussels may withhold development aid and impose trade and visa restrictions on migrant-source countries in Africa and Asia to force them to take back failed asylum-seekers.

In an interview with Britain’s The Times published Saturday, Dimitris Avramopoulos said EU chiefs “are considering stopping funding of major development projects. We invested in these regions to create opportunities and keep people there.”

He said countries which failed to cooperate with repatriations could face blanket visa restrictions. Germany recently threatened to withhold visas from the ruling elites of migrant-source countries that do not accept returnees.

But Avramopoulos appeared to indicate a much broader visa embargo is now being contemplated, saying “thousands of foreigners, from diplomats and doctors to students and researchers” would be impacted by the travel restrictions now under discussion.

“The EU is not afraid to make use of leverages in trade or visa policy. Let’s be honest: it is neither good for Africa nor for Europe that so many people cross the Mediterranean,” he said.

This is the first time EU commissioners have threatened to block access to European markets in response to a long-running migration crisis that’s roiling the continent and threatening to upend traditional party politics and empower populist nationalists.

The “hard borders” approach now being considered is being condemned by humanitarian NGOs, which often embrace a “no border” ideology.

On Monday, President Emmanuel Macron of France will chair talks featuring European and African leaders in Paris in a renewed bid to thrash out a more effective strategy to stem migrant flows. African leaders are likely to argue they need more development aid.

Italy’s dilemma

The following day EU national leaders will hold one of their regular summits in which the migration issue will figure prominently.  Both Italy and Germany have national elections in coming months and Italy’s Paolo Gentiloni and Germany’s Angela Merkel will likely want to show voters they are shutting down migrant routes.

Italy will push the EU to try to replicate with Libya a deal that was struck with Turkey last year, which largely shut down the migrant route through the Balkans. But analysts say such a deal would be unworkable when it comes to Libya given the lack of an effective central authority in the northern Africa state.

The migration influx has morphed into a political crisis for Italy’s left-leaning coalition government. In municipal elections earlier this year the coalition lost ground to center-right parties such as Matteo Salvini’s Northern League, which has called for a “stop to the invasion.”

Italy’s right-wing Forza Italia party has campaigned for the denial of landing rights to NGO ships carrying migrants. And even the maverick radical Five Star Movement is moving to an anti-immigrant position, calling for a halt to any new migrants being lodged in Rome.

Gentiloni has accused fellow EU nations of “looking the other way,” and not doing enough to assist Italy with the surge in migrants crossing the Mediterranean. A burden-sharing system across the EU has failed with just a few thousand taken off Italy’s hands by other EU member states.

Libya has become the main gateway to Europe for migrants and refugees from across sub-Saharan Africa, and also from the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Syria and Bangladesh. Many are fleeing war and persecution, but most who are using Libya are seeking to escape poverty. Italy has become the main point of arrival of those rescued off the coast of Libya.

As the economic migration has grown, with only a small proportion of asylum-seekers coming from countries engulfed in war, so sentiment in Italy has shifted with Italians becoming enraged at the strain the influx is having on the country’s migrant facilities, which are now all full, and the appearance of migrants even in far-flung villages.

600,000 asylum seekers

This week, police evicted more than a hundred Eritreans and Ethiopians from an abandoned office building near Rome’s central railway station. The occupants — who had been given refugee status — complained that Italy doesn’t help asylum-seekers integrate, fails to house them and provide language classes.

In fact, the Italian authorities do, housing many in villages across the country, providing months-long language tuition and up to 45 euros a day per refugee. But many refugees bolt the system, preferring to live in large cities such as Rome, Naples, Milan and Bologna and to try their luck.

The sheer numbers — more than 600,000 asylum-seekers have entered Italy since 2014 — are overwhelming. And the assistance asylum-seekers do receive is increasingly infuriating ordinary Italians in villages migrants are sent to for temporary periods. “I don’t get that money from the government and we are struggling as well — we don’t have enough jobs for our kids and now migrant kids will be competing for the few jobs that are around,” says Anna-Maria Bianchi, a mother-of-two from a Lazio village just north of Rome.

The only good news as far as Italian authorities are concerned is that there has been a fall-off in the rate of new arrivals this August and July. Official figures show arrivals in Italy from North Africa dropped by more than 50 percent in July from a year earlier and August arrivals are down even further, according to the International Organization for Migration.

The decline is being put down to several factors — from changeable sea conditions to a heightened Libyan coastguard presence and a reduction in humanitarian rescue-refugee operations.  There are also several probes by Italian authorities, who say NGOs have been colluding with people-traffickers. 
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NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Friday the alliance would closely watch Russian military exercises in western Russia and Belarus next month, urging Moscow to be transparent about the drills.

The maneuvers, the largest in years, with tanks, naval and air units operating in and around the Baltic and North Sea, have raised NATO’s concern that the official number of troops participating might be understated.

‘Watching very closely’

“We are going to be watching very closely the course of these exercises,” Stoltenberg told reporters after meeting Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo on a visit to check on the deployment of the U.S.-led alliance’s forces in the country’s east.

“All countries have the right to exercises of their armed forces, but the countries should also respect the obligation to be transparent.”

Russia has said that 13,000 troops will participate in the Sept. 14-20 drills, which under an international agreement is the limit for not requiring the presence of external observers. Western estimates have put the number of troops involved much higher.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said on Friday the drills were purely defensive and concerns about troop numbers were “inflated hype of an artificial nature” in Western media.

“We would like to emphasize that it is precisely these actions which lead to increased military tension in Europe,” the ministry said in a statement.

More meetings

Stoltenberg will meet with Polish, Turkish and Romanian foreign ministers later on Friday before visiting NATO troops in Poland’s Orzysz, about 57 kilometers (35 miles) south of Russia’s Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad, where Moscow has stationed nuclear-capable missiles and an S-400 air missile defense system.

“[The NATO deployment] is a clear signal that an attack on one ally is an attack on the whole alliance,” Stoltenberg said. “The matter here is to prevent conflicts and not to provoke them.”
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A man armed with a knife was detained Friday evening outside London’s Buckingham Palace, and two police officers were injured while arresting him, police said.

The Metropolitan Police force says two officers suffered minor injuries while detaining the suspect, who is being held on suspicion of grievous bodily harm and assaulting police.

Police said the officers did not require hospital treatment. No other injuries were reported.

A large number of police vehicles could be seen in the Mall, the wide road outside the palace.

Police said it was too early to say whether the incident was terrorism-related.

Buckingham Palace is one of London’s main tourist attractions, and the London home of Queen Elizabeth II.

The queen, however, usually spends August in Scotland at her Balmoral estate with family members.

Police stepped up patrols around major U.K. tourist sites after attacks with vehicles and knives earlier this year on Westminster Bridge, which is near Parliament, and London Bridge.

Buckingham Palace, which is surrounded by tall gates, has seen past security breaches. Last year, a man convicted of murder climbed a wall while the queen was at home, and was detained in the grounds.

In 1982, an intruder managed to sneak into the queen’s private chambers while she was in bed. Elizabeth spent 10 minutes chatting with him before calling for help.

A palace spokeswoman said the palace did not comment on security issues.
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The suspected mastermind of an international drug-smuggling operation has been arrested in London and faces extradition to the United States on charges that carry at least 30 years in prison upon conviction, prosecutors in New York said Friday.

Muhammad Asif Hafeez, 58, a Pakistani national known as “The Sultan,” was charged with trafficking several tons of heroin and methamphetamine, U.S. prosecutors said. He faces three counts in federal court in Manhattan, each with a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 10 years.

Lawyers for Hafeez could not immediately be identified.

Prosecutors said that from 2013 until his arrest, Hafeez conspired to import methamphetamine into the United States. They said that at one point, Hafeez and others sought to establish a methamphetamine production facility in Mozambique, but had to abandon that plan after authorities seized several tons of ephedrine from a factory in India that was to be used to make the methamphetamine.

Prosecutors have also accused Hafeez of conspiring to import heroin into the United States with Baktash Akasha Abdalla, the leader of an organized crime family in Kenya, and others.

Akasha was arrested in 2014 in a U.S.-led sting operation and was extradited along with three others to face charges in New York in January.
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American Defense Secretary Jim Mattis reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to restoring Ukraine’s soverignty and territorial integrity during a visit to the eastern European country. Mattis met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak. And as VOA correspondent Carla Babb reports, the question over whether the United States will provide Ukraine with lethal weapons loomed large during Thursday’s talks
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Norway and China have resumed talks on a bilateral free trade deal, Norway’s Industry Ministry said Thursday, in another sign that their relationship was thawing after a row over the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to dissident Liu Xiaobo.

Beijing suspended discussions immediately after the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Liu in 2010.

The dissident was jailed for 11 years in 2009 for “inciting subversion of state power” after he helped write a petition known as “Charter 08” calling for sweeping political reforms.

Liu died on July 13 from liver cancer.

China and Norway agreed to resume full diplomatic relations late last year and in June stepped up energy cooperation.

Several Norwegian firms, including Statoil, signed memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with Chinese partners.

“It is good that negotiations are resuming,” Trade and Industry Minister Monica Maeland said in a statement.

The two sides had agreed to meet once more before the end of the year to discuss the trade of goods, services and investments, the statement said.

Initial reports from Norwegian negotiators were “very promising,” Maeland said.

A free trade deal would benefit producers of farmed salmon — Norway is the world’s largest producer — such as Marine Harvest, Salmar, Leroey, Norway Royal Salmon and Grieg Seafood.
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A new U.S. study has found an “extreme level” of wealth inequality in Russia that has increased much more significantly than it has in former Eastern European communist countries and in China since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

The study, conduced by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found inequality in Russia has been driven by the transition from communism, during which wealthy Russians accumulated offshore wealth about three times larger than the net value of the country’s foreign reserves. This offshore wealth is comparable to all the financial assets held by households throughout Russia.

‘Dramatic failure’

“The dramatic failure of Soviet communism and egalitarian ideology … seems to have led to relatively high tolerance for large inequality and concentration of private property,” the study said.

It predicts inequality in Russia will persist “as long as billionaires and oligarchs appear to be loyal to the Russian state and perceived national interests.”

Russian living standards were between 60 percent to 65 percent of the Western European average in 1990 and 1991 and increased to 70 percent to 75 percent by the mid-2010s, according to the study.

Rent-based resources

The levels of inequality in Russia are in part the result of “a persistent concentration of rent-based resources, which are unlikely to be the best recipes for sustainable development and growth,” researchers said.

The study said official estimates of inequality in Russia greatly underestimate the concentration of income. Researchers said the report includes the “first complete balance sheet series” detailing private, public and national wealth and offshore wealth estimates in post-Soviet Russia.

The National Bureau of Economic Research is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization.
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Net migration to Britain has fallen to a three-year low as a growing number of European Union nationals left the country following last year’s Brexit referendum, according to official figures released Thursday.

The figures from the Office for National Statistics provide evidence that the uncertainty and economic jitters caused by Britain’s vote to quit the EU are having an impact on immigration.

The statistics office said net migration – the difference between arrivals and departures – was 246,000 in the year to March 31, a fall of 81,000 on a year earlier. More than half the change was due to a decline of 51,000 in net migration from the EU.

A total of 122,000 EU citizens left Britain in the year to March, up 31,000 from the year before and the highest outflow in nearly a decade.

There was a particularly sharp rise in departures from citizens of the “EU 8” — eastern European nations that joined the bloc in 2004. Hundreds of thousands of Poles, Lithuanians and other eastern Europeans moved to Britain to work after 2004.

EU citizens have the right to live and work in any member state, and more than 3 million nationals of other EU countries live in Britain.

When Britain formally leaves the EU in March 2019, it will have the power to set restrictions on the movement of people from the EU, leaving many uncertain about their future rights.

Nicola White, head of international migration figures at the statistics office, said the figures “indicate that the EU referendum result may be influencing people’s decision to migrate into and out of the U.K., particularly EU and EU8 citizens.”

“It is too early to tell if this is an indication of a long-term trend,” she said.

A slowdown in the British economy could be making the country less attractive to migrants. The statistics agency confirmed Thursday that the economy grew by a modest 0.3 percent in the second quarter of 2017 from the previous three months, slower than any other Group of Seven economy.
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U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday during a visit to Ukraine that Russia is “seeking to redraw international borders by force” and that U.S. sanctions against Russia will remain in place until the government in Moscow changes its behavior.

Mattis spoke alongside Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko after a meeting with him and other leaders in Kyiv.

The Pentagon chief reiterated U.S. support for Ukraine, and said it does not accept Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

He also said Russia has not lived up to its commitments in the Minsk Agreement to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine, as well as other deals the country has endorsed.

“The U.S. and our allies will continue to press Russia to honor its Minsk commitments and our sanctions will remain in place until Moscow reverses the actions that triggered them,” Mattis said.

He added that the U.S. remains committed to finding a diplomatic resolution to the situation in Ukraine.
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Switzerland’s attorney general’s office said Thursday it indicted a 30-year-old woman for trying to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State militant group.

A statement said the attorney general had evidence that the woman, who is a Swiss citizen, traveled two years ago with her four-year-old son from Egypt to Greece in an attempt to go further to Turkey and into Syria.

The woman was stopped by Greek authorities, and then later arrested in Zurich in January 2016 as she returned to Switzerland.

Her name was not released.

The attorney general’s office said in its statement that it has a strict policy of prosecuting what it called “Jihadi travelers.”
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Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Wednesday Donald Trump must be shown appropriate respect for holding the office of the U.S. president, even if she may differ with him on policy issues.

Merkel, campaigning for a fourth term in office after a Sept. 24 national election, has refused to bend to pressure from her Social Democrat (SPD) rivals to resist demands by Trump for NATO members to increase their defense spending.

As a committed Atlanticist, she has stressed the strength of German relations with the United States even when flagging differences in opinion on policy.

“If you take the president of the United States, whatever differences of opinion there may be, I know he prevailed in a tough election. It wasn’t reserved for him on a silver platter,” she told business daily Handelsblatt in an interview.

“In the end, he won the election under American electoral law and that means he is democratically elected and that this person should be shown the appropriate respect, regardless of how I assess his views,” she added.

Her SPD challenger, Martin Schulz, has been far more critical of Trump, referring to the U.S. president as “this irresponsible man in the White House.”

Merkel, who enjoyed holidaying in the United States before becoming chancellor in 2005, said she missed the opportunity to vacation there now.

“I can’t go on holiday in San Diego now as chancellor because the time difference is too much, and that is something I miss a bit, but the work itself is so marvelous that I can afford to miss it.”
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France on Wednesday backed a commitment by U.S. President Donald Trump to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan.

“France recognizes the importance of this undertaking and remains resolutely engaged in the struggle against terrorism,” a Foreign Ministry statement said.

Trump on Monday rowed back on a campaign pledge to quit Afghanistan, committing instead to an open-ended “fight to win” against Taliban insurgents there.
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A Moscow court placed prominent Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov under house arrest Wednesday on embezzlement charges in a case seen by many as an effort by authorities to squash dissent.

The 47-year-old Serebrennikov was arrested Tuesday on the set of a movie he was shooting in St. Petersburg and driven to a jail in Moscow, where he spent the night.

Serebrennikov is accused of embezzling $1.1 million in government money he received to fund his productions between 2011 and 2014. He denied those allegations in court Wednesday.

A judge in Moscow’s Basmanny Court rejected Serebrennikov’s request to be released on bail, even after his lawyer offered to provide as collateral the $1.1 million Serebrennikov is accused of embezzling. He will be under house arrest until October.

Serebrennikov is known in Russia for his theatrical productions that mock the government. His detention is widely viewed as part of Moscow’s efforts to silence critics.

Many members of Russia’s arts community spoke out on behalf of Serebrennikov following his detention. Irina Prokhorova, a sister of billionaire tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov, who owns the Brooklyn Nets basketball team, called Serebrennikov “the pride of Russia.”

In 2012, Serebrennikov took the helm of an aging Soviet-era theater and turned it into a popular, modern venue known as the Gogol Center. He is considered by many to be a mainstream cultural figure in Russia, although his interpretations of classic works have drawn criticism from conservative Russian politicians.

If convicted on the embezzlement charges, Serebrennikov could face up to 10 years in prison.

 
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As many as 200 migrants clashed near the northern French port city of Calais, using sticks and iron bars in five mass brawls that mainly pitted Afghans against Eritreans, authorities said Tuesday.

A total of 21 migrants and six riot police were injured, none seriously, during the clashes that broke out between Monday night and Tuesday afternoon, the Pas-de-Calais prefecture said.

Up to 150 migrants were involved in the last fight, which started on a road leading out of the Calais city center and moved to a highway, the prefecture said. The regional Voix du Nord newspaper said the violent skirmishes held up traffic.

Four other fights began late Monday and continued until dawn as police dispersed the groups with tear gas.

Police detained seven migrants for questioning and put 20 others in administrative detention, meaning they risk expulsion from France, according to the prefecture.

Authorities cleared some 7,000 migrants from a makeshift camp in Calais last fall, but people hoping to enter Britain by crossing the English Channel in trains or ferries are steadily returning. Authorities estimate about 400 migrants are now in the Calais area, while aid groups put the number at about 600.

Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said three weeks ago that even though there are far fewer migrants in Calais compared to a year ago, 30,000 attempts to sneak into the Eurotunnel complex or onto ferries had been made since the start of 2017. Many of the people on the French side of the Channel make repeated attempts.

The interior minister announced at the end of July that two special centers to shelter migrants in Calais would be opened. However, the shelters for willing occupants are aimed at speeding up assessments of their situations, including whether they are to be expelled from France.
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Ukrainian cyber security firm ISSP said on Tuesday it may have detected a new computer virus distribution campaign, after security services said Ukraine could face cyber-attacks similar to those which knocked out global systems in June.

The June 27 attack, dubbed NotPetya, took down many Ukrainian government agencies and businesses, before spreading rapidly through corporate networks of multinationals with operations or suppliers in eastern Europe.

ISPP said that, as with NotPetya, the new malware seemed to originate in accounting software and could be intended to take down networks when Ukraine celebrates its Independence Day on Aug. 24.

“This could be an indicator of a massive cyber-attack preparation before National Holidays in Ukraine,” it said in a statement.

In a statement, the state cyber police said they also had detected new malicious software.

The incident is “in no way connected with global cyber-attacks like those that took place on June 27 of this year and is now fully under control,” it said.

The state cyber police and the Security and Defense Council have said Ukraine could be targeted with a NotPetya-style attack aimed at destabilizing the country as it marks its 1991 independence from the Soviet Union.

Last Friday, the central bank said it had warned state-owned and private lenders of the appearance of new malware, spread by opening email attachments of word documents.

Ukraine – regarded by some, despite Kremlin denials, as a guinea pig for Russian state-sponsored hacks – is fighting an uphill battle in turning pockets of protection into a national strategy to keep state institutions and systemic companies safe.
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