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British Prime Minister Theresa May vowed Tuesday to give lawmakers a vote on holding a second Brexit referendum as part of her final effort to salvage her hated EU divorce deal.

The embattled British leader dangled a package of sweeteners that she hopes can resolve the Brexit crisis three years after the country first voted to end more than four decades of membership in the European project.

Success on the fourth attempt in parliament would help May reclaim her legacy as the leader who kept her promise to safely steer a bitterly divided nation through its most profound strategic shift in generations.

May has already said she will leave office shortly after the measures she outlined Tuesday are put up for a vote early next month — no matter the outcome.

The most eye-catching is a promise to give lawmakers a chance to set a confirmatory referendum on whatever version of Brexit they end up approving in the weeks or months to come.

“I recognize the genuine and sincere strength of feeling across the house on this important issue,” May said in a nationally televised address delivered from the offices of a major accounting firm in London.

“The government will therefore include in the Withdrawal Agreement Bill at introduction a requirement to vote on whether to hold a second referendum,” she said.

“This must take place before the Withdrawal Agreement can be ratified.”

The measure is a key demand of the main opposition Labor Party.

But it is also bitterly opposed by Brexit-supporting Conservatives whose votes May also needs if she is to get her deal passed.

The British pound rose sharply in response to May’s announcement. Many businesses oppose Brexit and hope that the two sides can preserve much closer ties.

‘Last chance’

May said her proposals were this parliament’s “last chance” to end a political deadlock that has already delayed Brexit past its original March deadline and caused huge public anger.

She called them “a new Brexit deal” that Britain must now rally behind.

The government is aiming for the law to be approved by the time that parliament’s summer recess begins on July 20, which would allow Britain to leave the EU at the end of that month — as long as MPs reject a second referendum.

Otherwise the process could be delayed until October 31 — the deadline set by the EU — or even later if EU leaders grant Britain another postponement.

“The majority of MPs say they want to deliver the result of the referendum. So I think we need to help them find a way. And I believe there is now one last chance to do that,” May said.

May set out 10 incentives in all that will be included in a new Brexit bill that is expected to come up for a vote in the week starting June 3.

The measures would give parliament a chance to approve a temporary customs union with the other 27 nations.

They also commit the government to preserve the rights of European workers and maintain EU environmental standards.

These are all major Labor demands.

But they threaten to only reinforce the resistance within Brexit-backing ranks of her own Conservative Party.

Former foreign secretary Boris Johnson, the favorite to replace May in a leadership contest, said on Twitter that he would not support the new incarnation of the deal, having voted for it the last time it was put to parliament. 

“The Bill is directly against our manifesto – and I will not vote for it. We can and must do better – and deliver what the people voted for,” he said, rejecting the idea of any customs union or second referendum.

May warned EU skeptics within her party ranks that a rejection of her final throw of the dice threatened to doom Brexit for good.

This compromise solution “is practical,” May said. “It is responsible. It is deliverable. And right now, it is slipping away from us.”

‘Harder than anticipated’

The last vote on the Brexit deal in March was the closest. She lost that by 58 votes in the 650-seat House of Commons.

But most analysts and UK newspapers still give May little-to-no chance of winning on this occasion.

The vote also comes with the race to succeed her as party leader in full swing.

British media estimate that a third of her cabinet members have either openly declared their ambitions to become prime minister or are preparing their campaigns.

Her speech was billed by some as her possible swan song — and May conceded that her time in office has not been smooth.

“I knew that delivering Brexit was not going to be simple or straightforward,” May said.

“It has proved even harder than I anticipated.”
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The U.N. human rights office warns civilian casualties are growing in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province as fighting between Russian-backed Syrian government forces and rebels allied with al-Qaida escalates.

The U.N. agency says it is extremely worried about the military action in Idlib, which is putting at risk the lives of three million civilians trapped in the province. Agency officials express concern at the speed with which a recent 72-hour cease-fire was broken by the warring parties.

They say ongoing airstrikes and ground-based attacks in Idlib and Hama governorates do not bode well for peaceful prospects in the region.

U.N. human rights spokeswoman Marta Hurtado says indiscriminate bombing and ground-based attacks by both pro-government forces and rebel armed groups has resulted in a high number of civilian casualties and injuries, as well as significant damage to civilian property.

“Military objects have been placed in close proximity to civilians and civilian objects, resulting in deaths and injuries among civilians, and causing significant damage to civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, mosques, schools and markets,” she said.

This latest military escalation started at the end of April. Since then, the U.N. reports at least 105 civilians have been killed. It says about two-thirds of those deaths have occurred between May 8 and 16.

The U.N. says the intensified fighting has also forced at least 200,000 people to flee their homes in search of safety.

The U.N. human rights office is appealing to the warring factions to respect the principles of distinction and proportionality under international humanitarian law. It says parties to the conflict are obliged to do everything feasible not to put civilians in harm’s way.
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 German authorities on Tuesday handed over to Israel some 5,000 documents kept by a confidant of Franz Kafka, a trove whose plight could have been plucked from one of the author’s surreal stories.

The papers returned include a postcard from Kafka from 1910 and personal documents kept by Max Brod, which experts say provide a window into Europe’s literary and cultural scene in the early 20th century.

They are among some 40,000 documents, including manuscripts, correspondence, notebooks and other writings that once belonged to Brod, which are being brought together again in Israel’s National Library. They had ended up in bank vaults in Switzerland and Tel Aviv, a Tel Aviv apartment and in a storage facility in Wiesbaden, Germany, where police found them tucked among forged Russian avant-garde artworks.

`I think he [Kafka] would really be amused,” said National Library archivist and humanities collection curator Stefan Litt, who helped identify the papers recovered in Germany. “He couldn’t invent by himself a better plot.”

The documents recovered in Wiesbaden have little to do with Kafka himself, but make the Brod collection complete and shine a light on Brod and his circle, which included Kafka and other writers, Litt said.

“This is an important chapter in Max Brod’s estate,” Litt said. “And it’s always good for researchers to have as complete a picture as possible.”

Kafka, a Bohemian Jew from Prague who lived for a while in Berlin, was close friends with Brod, himself an accomplished writer. Shortly before his untimely death at 40 of tuberculosis in 1924, Kafka bequeathed his writings to Brod, reportedly telling him to burn them all unread.

Instead, Brod published much of the collection, including the novels “The Trial,” The Castle,” and “Amerika,” helping to posthumously establish Kafka as one of the great authors of the 20th century. He also brought “Kafkaesque” into the English language to describe a situation evoking a bizarre, illogical or nightmarish situation like the ones Kafka wrote about.

After the Nazis occupied the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Brod fled to escape persecution with the entire collection to what was then British-ruled Palestine.When Brod died, he left his personal secretary Esther Hoffe in charge of his literary estate and instructed her to transfer the Kafka papers to an academic institution.

Instead, she kept the documents for the next four decades and sold some, like the original manuscript of Kafka’s “The Trial,” which fetched $1.8 million at auction in 1988. She kept some of the items in a bank vault in Tel Aviv, some in Switzerland, and others at her apartment in Tel Aviv.

When she died in 2008, the collection went to her two daughters, who fought to keep it but eventually lost a battle in Israel’s Supreme Court in 2016. The court sided with the country’s National Library, whose lawyers had argued the Kafka papers were “cultural assets” that belonged to the Jewish people.

Both daughters have now died, and the documents stored in Israel have already been transferred to the National Library’s care. The documents held in Switzerland should be on their way soon after the National Library won a court case in Zurich last month, which upheld the Israeli verdict and ordered that several safe deposit boxes be opened and their contents shipped to the institution in Jerusalem.

But that left the documents in Germany, which had been stolen from Hoffe’s apartment about a decade ago.

They ended up with an Israeli dealer, who tried in 2013 to sell them to the German Literature Archive in Marbach — the same institution that bought “The Trial” manuscript at auction in 1988. The German archive instead reported the offer to Israel’s National Library, which then got authorities involved, Litt said.

The documents resurfaced at the Wiesbaden storage facility of an international forgery ring that produced and sold millions of euros [dollars] worth of forged paintings, which was taken down by German authorities that same year, Litt said. Since then, they have been stored by German authorities as Litt and others sought to confirm their provenance.

Those being returned include correspondence between Brod and his wife, and even some of his notebooks from high school, Litt said.

“There’s no doubt these materials were part of his papers,” he said.

The manuscript of “The Trial,” however, was properly purchased by the German Literature Archive in the 1988 Sotheby’s auction, and the National Library has no claim on it, he said.

“We’re happy it’s in safe hands,” Litt said.
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Ukraine’s new president on Tuesday ordered the dissolution of the nation’s legislature and called a snap election in two months, hoping to ride the wave of his electoral success to get his supporters into parliament.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a 41-year-old comedian who won 73% of the vote last month, announced his intention to disband parliament in his inauguration speech Monday, saying that current lawmakers are focused on self-enrichment and lack public trust.

He quickly fulfilled the promise in Tuesday’s decree that set the parliamentary election for July 21.

The election to the Verkhovna Rada was originally scheduled for Oct. 27, a situation that would have put Zelenskiy in a position where he would face a parliament dominated by supporters of former President Petro Poroshenko and would be unable to pursue his agenda for months.

Zelenskiy, who has become famous for playing the role of a Ukrainian president in a widely popular TV sitcom, is gambling that his popularity will allow his party to make a successful showing in the parliamentary vote.

“Zelenskiy is trying to act as quickly as possible, because he realizes that voters’ excitement will cool down in half-a-year,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kiev-based independent think-tank Penta.

His foes in parliament sought to push back his inauguration past the May 27 deadline by which the parliament can be dissolved, but eventually had to submit to public pressure.

Zelenskiy’s landslide victory reflected Ukrainians’ exasperation with the country’s economic woes and rampant official corruption and the country’s political elite.

Zelenskiy already has asked several top ministers to step down, but he will likely have trouble getting their successors appointed by the current parliament.

In his inaugural speech, Zelenskiy said the main goal for the presidency is to bring peace to eastern Ukraine, where government troops have been fighting Russia-backed separatists for five years in a conflict that has left at least 13,000 dead.
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Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz called time Monday on his coalition government with the far-right Freedom Party after its leader was shown on video appearing to offer favors to a purported Russian investor.

Kurz said he was seeking the removal of the country’s interior minister, Freedom Party politician Herbert Kickl, to ensure an unbiased probe into the video.

“I’m firmly convinced that what’s necessary now is total transparency and a completely and unbiased investigation,” Kurz told reporters in Vienna.

The Freedom Party reacted by withdrawing its ministers from the government.

“We won’t leave anyone out in the rain,” said the party’s interim leader, Norbert Hofer.

Kickl’s removal, which must still be approved by Austria’s president, follows the resignation on Saturday of Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache, who was also Austria’s vice chancellor. 

That came a day after two German newspapers published a video showing Strache pandering to a woman claiming to be a Russian tycoon’s niece at a boozy gathering in Ibiza two years ago, shortly before national elections. Strache and party colleague Johann Gudenus are heard telling the woman that she can expect lucrative construction contracts if she buys an Austrian newspaper and supports the Freedom Party. They also discuss ways of secretly funneling money to the party.

Gudenus, who was instrumental in arranging the meeting, has quit as leader of the party’s parliamentary group and is leaving the party.

The Hamburg-based weekly Der Spiegel and Munich daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung said the meeting in Ibiza was likely a trap that Strache and Gudenus had fallen for. The papers refused to reveal the source of the video.

Kurz noted that at the time the video was shot, Kickl was general-secretary of the Freedom Party and therefore responsible for its financial conduct. The chancellor added that in his conversations with Kickl and other Freedom Party officials following the video’s release, he “didn’t really have the feeling (they had) an awareness of the dimension of the whole issue.”

String of scandals

The ouster of the Freedom Party from the government was a setback for populist and nationalist forces as Europe heads into the final days of campaigning for the European Parliament elections, which run Thursday through Sunday.

Kurz has endorsed a hard line on migration and public finances, and he chose to ally with the Freedom Party after winning the 2017 election. 

The chancellor, who is personally popular, had said Saturday that “enough is enough” — a reference to a string of smaller scandals involving the Freedom Party that had plagued his government. In recent months, those have included a poem in a party newsletter comparing migrants to rats and questions over links to extreme-right groups.

Kickl, a longtime campaign mastermind of the Freedom Party, had already drawn criticism over matters including a raid last year on Austria’s BVT spy agency, which opposition parties claimed was an attempt by the new government to purge domestic political enemies.

Kickl’s party said he had done nothing wrong and sought to portray itself as the victim of a plot. 

Response from Russia

The Russian government, meanwhile, said it couldn’t comment on the video “because it has nothing to do with the Russian Federation, its president or the government.”

President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said of the woman in the Strache video that set off the crisis: “We don’t know who that woman is and whether she’s Russian or not.” 

Pledging to ensure stability in Austria over the coming months, Kurz said vacancies in the government left by the Freedom Party’s departure would be filled with civil servants and technocrats.

His government, meanwhile, may find it difficult to continue as planned until Austria holds early elections, likely in September. Opposition parties plan to call for a vote of no confidence in Kurz’s government in the coming days. 
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Indonesia on Monday sentenced a French drug smuggler to death by firing squad, in a shock verdict after prosecutors had asked for a long prison term.

The three-judge panel in Lombok handed a capital sentence to Felix Dorfin, 35, who was arrested in September at the airport on the holiday island next to Bali, where foreigners are routinely charged with drugs offenses.

Indonesia has some of the world’s strictest drug laws — including death for some traffickers.

It has executed foreigners in the past, including the masterminds of Australia’s Bali Nine heroin gang.

While Dorfin was eligible for the death penalty, prosecutors instead asked for a 20-year jail term plus another year unless he paid a huge fine equivalent to about $700,000.

But Indonesian courts have been known to issue harsher-than-demanded punishments.

Dorfin was carrying a suitcase filled with about three kilograms (6.6 pounds) of drugs including ecstasy and amphetamines when he was arrested.

“After finding Felix Dorfin legally and convincingly guilty of importing narcotics … (he) is sentenced to the death penalty,” presiding judge Isnurul Syamsul Arif told the court.

The judge cited Dorfin’s involvement in an international drug syndicate and the amount of drugs in his possession as aggravating factors.

“The defendant’s actions could potentially do damage to the younger generation,” Arif added.

The Frenchman made headlines in January when he escaped from a police detention center and spent nearly two weeks on the run before he was captured.

A female police officer was arrested for allegedly helping Dorfin escape from jail in exchange for money.

It was not clear if the jailbreak played any role in Monday’s stiffer-than-expected sentence.

Wearing a red prison vest, Dorfin, who is from Bethune in northern France, sat impassively through much of the hearing, as a translator scribbled notes beside him.

After the sentencing, he said little as he walked past reporters to a holding cell.

“Dorfin was shocked,” the Frenchman’s lawyer Deny Nur Indra told AFP.

“He didn’t expect this at all because prosecutors only asked for 20 years.”

The lawyer said he would appeal against the sentence, describing his client as a “victim” who did not know the exact contents of what he was carrying in the suitcase.

“If he had known, he wouldn’t have brought it here,” Indra added.

In Paris, the French foreign ministry said it was “concerned” by the sentence and reiterated France’s opposition to the death penalty.

“We will remain attentive to his situation,” the statement said, adding that seven French people faced the death penalty worldwide.

In 2015, Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran — the accused ringleaders of the Bali Nine  — were executed by firing squad in Indonesia.

The Bali Nine gang’s only female member was released from jail last year, while some others remain in prison.

The highly publicized case sparked diplomatic outrage and a call to abolish the death penalty.

“The death penalty verdict marks another setback for human rights in Indonesia,” Human Rights Watch campaigner Andreas Harsono said Monday.

“The Indonesian government’s many pledges about moving toward abolishing the death penalty clearly meant nothing in Lombok”.

There are scores of foreigners on death row in Indonesia, including cocaine-smuggling British grandmother Lindsay Sandiford and Serge Atlaoui, a Frenchman who has been on death row since 2007.

Last year, eight Taiwanese drug smugglers were sentenced to death by an Indonesian court after being caught with around a tonne of crystal methamphetamine.
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With Julian Assange locked away in a London jail, a new battle has broken out over what may contain some of the WikiLeaks founder’s biggest secrets: his computers.

On Monday, judicial authorities from Ecuador carried out an inventory of all the belongings and digital devices left behind at the London embassy following his expulsion last month from the diplomatic compound that had been his home the past seven years.  

It came as Sweden announced it was seeking Assange’s arrest on suspicion of rape, setting up a possible future tug-of-war with the United States over any extradition of Assange from Britain.

It’s not known what devices authorities removed from the embassy or what information they contained. But authorities said they were acting on a request by the U.S. prosecutors, leading Assange’s defenders to claim that Ecuador has undermined the most basic principles of asylum while denying the secret-spiller’s right to prepare his defense.  

“It’s disgraceful,” WikiLeaks’ editor in chief, Kristinn Hrafnsson, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Ecuador granted him asylum because of the threat of extradition to the U.S. and now the same country, under new leadership, is actively collaborating with a criminal investigation against him.”

Assange, 47, was arrested on April 11 after being handed over to British authorities by Ecuador. He is serving a 50-week sentence in a London prison for skipping bail while the U.S. seeks his extradition for conspiring to hack into military computers and spill secrets about U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hrafnsson, who has visited the Australian activist in jail, said Assange saw his eviction coming for weeks as relations with President Lenin Moreno’s government deteriorated, so he took great care to scrub computers and hard drives of any compromising material, including future planned leaks or internal communications with WikiLeaks collaborators.

Still, Hrafnsson said he fully expects Moreno or the Americans to claim revelations that don’t exist. He called Monday’s proceedings a “horse show” because no legal authority can guarantee Assange’s devices haven’t been tampered with, or the chain of custody unbroken, in the six weeks since his arrest.

“If anything surfaces, I can assure you it would’ve been planted,” he said. “Julian isn’t a novice when it comes to security and securing his information. We expected this to happen and protections have been in place for a very long time.”

A group of Assange’s supporters gathered outside Ecuador’s Embassy in London to protest the judicial proceeding. Demonstrators put banners on the railings with images of Assange, his mouth covered by an American flag, and chanted “Thieves! Thieves! Thieves! Shame on you!”

Ecuadorian authorities said they will hand over any belongings not given to U.S. or Ecuadorian investigators to Assange’s lawyers, who weren’t invited to Monday’s inventory-taking. Hrafnsson said he didn’t have a full inventory of Assange’s devices.

Moreno decided to evict Assange from the embassy after accusing him of working with political opponents to hack into his phone and release damaging personal documents and photos, including several that showed him eating lobster in bed and the numbers of bank accounts allegedly used to hide proceeds from corruption.

Moreno’s actions immediately were celebrated by the Trump administration, which was key in helping Ecuador secure a $4.2 billion credit line from the International Monetary Fund and has provided the tiny South American country with new trade and military deals in recent weeks.

“The Americans are the ones pulling the strings, and Moreno their puppet dancing to the tune of money,” said Hrafnsson.

Separately on Monday, Swedish authorities issued a request for a detention order against Assange.

On May 13, Swedish prosecutors reopened a preliminary investigation against Assange, who visited Sweden in 2010, because two Swedish women said they were the victims of sex crimes committed by Assange.

While a case of alleged sexual misconduct against Assange in Sweden was dropped in 2017 when the statute of limitations expired, a rape allegation remains. Swedish authorities have had to shelve it because Assange was living at the embassy at the time and there was no prospect of bringing him to Sweden.

The statute of limitations in the rape case expires in August next year. Assange has denied wrongdoing, asserting that the allegations were politically motivated and that the sex was consensual.

According to the request for a detention order obtained by The Associated Press, Assange is wanted for “intentionally having carried out an intercourse” with an unnamed woman “by unduly exploiting that she was in a helpless state because of sleep.”
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Tens of thousands of demonstrators opposed to right-wing populism and nationalism took to the streets Sunday in a number of European cities before May 23-26 elections to the European Parliament.

Marches in Germany were held under the banner of “One Europe for Everyone: Your Voice Against Nationalism” in cities including Berlin, Cologne, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Munich and Hamburg.

Organizers from more than 70 groups support the European Union, but also urge changes in migration policy such as support for refugee rescue missions in the Mediterranean Sea.

Other gatherings under the slogan “No to Hate, Yes to Change” were planned in Budapest, Genoa, Utrecht, Warsaw, Bucharest and other cities.

The dpa news agency said organizers reported 20,000 protesters in Berlin, while police estimated 10,000 in Munich, 14,000 in Frankfurt, and 10,000 in Hamburg.

The 751-seat European Parliament has limited powers but the poll is being seen as a test of strength both by right-wing, populist and nationalist groups who want curbs on immigration and more authority for national governments on the one hand, and on the other by center-left and center-left mainstream parties who support the EU as a bulwark of cooperation among its 28 member states, rule of law and democracy.

 
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A Russian gun rights activist serving a U.S. prison sentence for acting as an unregistered foreign agent has released a video asking for money to help pay her legal costs.

Maria Butina was sentenced in April to 18 months after she admitted gathering intelligence on the National Rifle Association and other groups at the direction of a former Russian lawmaker.

In the video that appeared on social media, Butina speaks on a phone in a dormitory with bunk beds. She says her lawyer is filing an appeal and she asks for contributions to help pay him.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Sunday on state TV that “we aren’t financing a lawyer, but we are doing everything so that she will be afforded all rights as a Russian citizen.”

 
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The Italian interior ministry vowed Sunday to press ahead with a new decree formalizing the closure of Italian ports to aid groups that rescue migrants, even after U.N. human rights investigators said it violated international law.

Ministry officials said the security decree was “necessary and urgent” and was expected to be approved at a Cabinet meeting Monday.

In a May 15 letter to Italy’s government released Saturday, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights urged Italy to withdraw the decree, calling it “yet another political attempt to criminalize search and rescue operations.”

The decree “further intensifies the climate of hostility and xenophobia against migrants,” said the letter, which was signed by several U.N. human rights rapporteurs.

Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, a hard-line populist, proposed the decree before the European Parliament elections this week, where nationalist, anti-migrant parties are hoping to make strong gains. Salvini’s League has soared in popularity in part because of his hard-line migration policy, which has involved boosting the Libyan coast guard’s ability to rescue migrants and bring them back.

Among other provisions, the decree leaves it to the interior minister to limit or prohibit entry into Italian territorial waters any ships for public security reasons. It foresees fines of up to 5,500 euros ($6,145) for each migrant transported.

The U.N. letter says the measures would violate migrants’ human rights, which are enshrined in U.N. conventions that Italy has signed. It said Italy is obliged to rescue migrants in distress and can’t impede others from doing so. And it says that Libya can’t be considered a safe port for migrants rescued at sea, particularly after the recent spike in fighting.

Interior ministry officials told journalists in a statement Sunday that Turkey and North Korea similarly punish border violations and that Italy has long had fines in its legal code, which have merely been updated.

“The hope is that the authoritative U.N. dedicates its energies to the humanitarian emergency in Venezuela rather than engage in electoral campaigning in Italy,” they said.
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Thousands of people marched through Belfast Saturday to demand the recognition of same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland, the only region of the United Kingdom where it does not have legal status.

Attempts to legislate for same-sex marriage have been blocked by the Democratic Unionist Party, a key ally of British Prime Minister Theresa May, despite opinion polls in recent years showing most in the region are in favor.

Sara Canning, the partner of journalist and LGBT rights campaigner Lyra McKee who was killed in April, led the march alongside a number of gay and lesbian couples. Canning said that she and McKee had been planning to marry.

“We pay our taxes, we are governed by the same laws, why should we not be afforded the same rights in marriage” as the rest of the United Kingdom, said Canning, who was wearing a “Love Equality” T-shirt. Protesters waved rainbow flags and placards saying “Love is a human right.”

Protesters called on May’s government to bypass the DUP and introduce legislation in the British parliament in Westminster. The Northern Ireland power-sharing government has been frozen for two years because of disagreement between the DUP and the largest Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein.

“If Stormont is incapable of delivering equality for people here, then it is the responsibility of the Westminster to end discrimination against the LGBT community,” Amnesty International spokesman Patrick Corrigan said.
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Maltese police Saturday said they were questioning two soldiers over a drive-by shooting in April in which an African migrant was killed.

Ivorian national Lassana Cisse was killed April 6 when he was shot from a car as he walked down a street in Hal Far, close to an army barracks and a migrants’ center.

Two men, one from Gambia and the other from Guinea, were injured.

Police said the attack was racially motivated and a source in the investigation said one of the suspects had admitted to targeting the migrants “just because they were black.”

On Saturday, the police confirmed that two Maltese suspects, both soldiers in the Armed Forces of Malta, were in custody.

The weapon and the vehicle used in the crime had been seized, police said.

The deceased man used to work in a factory near Hal Far, in the south of Malta. He was known for checking on his fellow countrymen in the migrants’ center after work, media reported.

In a series of tweets, Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said an investigation involving other security services would determine whether the suspects were rogue individuals or part of a wider network.

He said hatred and division had no place in Malta’s society.

“There are consequences to spreading such ill-placed sentiments,” he said. “We remain steadfast in our call for unity among the Maltese and all those who live in Malta.”
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Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday that the purchase of S-400 defense systems from Russia was a done deal, adding that Ankara would also jointly produce S-500 defense systems with Moscow. 

U.S. officials have called Turkey’s planned purchase of the S-400 missile defense system “deeply problematic,” saying it would risk Ankara’s partnership in the joint strike fighter F-35 program because it would compromise the jets, made by Lockheed Martin Corp. 

However, Erdogan said at a televised question-and-answer session with university students in Istanbul that Turkey had carried out technical work and found that such a problem did not exist. 

“They [the U.S.] are passing the ball around in the midfield now, showing some reluctance. But sooner or later, we will receive the F-35s. [The U.S.] not delivering them is not an option,” he said.
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Austria’s vice chancellor has resigned.

Heinz-Christian Strache stepped down Saturday after two German newspapers — Der Spiegel and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung — posted video footage of him appearing to offer state contracts to a potential Russian benefactor.

Strache said Saturday he was the “victim of a targeted political attack,” but admitted that his actions in the video were “stupid and a mistake.”

Political analysts say the scandal throws into the question the governing coalition between Strache’s anti-immigration Freedom Party and Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s center-right People’s Party.

Neither politician has commented on the future of their alliance.

 
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The victims of an infamous Nazi pedophile commune in Chile say the compensation of up to $11,000 Germany has agreed to pay each of them is not enough.

Germany said Friday it would pay the funds to the victims of Colonia Dignidad commune founded in 1961 by Paul Schaefer, a former Nazi soldier.

The commune was promoted as an idyllic German family village. The reality of the place, however, was something sinister.

Dozens of children were sexually abused at Colonia Dignidad by Schaefer.

Its approximately 300 German and Chilean residents were abused and drugged. They were prevented from leaving the site that was surrounded by armed guards with dogs.

Survivors say they were virtual slaves.

Horst Schaffrick told the French news agency AFP that the money is “a help, yes, but it does not solve the problem. We are a lost generation.” Schaffrick, who was three when he arrived at the commune with his family, says he was sexually molested by Schaefer.

A lawyer for the survivors said, “What we would have wanted, and what we are arguing for, would be that we give settlers who are old enough to retire a decent pension, no more and no less.”

A German report released Friday said, “The survivors still suffer massively from the severe psychological and physical consequences after years of harm caused by violence, abuse, exploitation and slave labor.”

The report also said that compensation to the victims would be paid “exclusively out of moral responsibility and without recognition of a legal obligation.”

The commune also “actively collaborated with Pinochet dictatorship henchmen on torture, murder and disappearances,” according to the German report in a reference to Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s dictator from 1973 – 1990, who tortured and “disappeared” his critics.

Schaefer was arrested in 2005 in Argentina. He was jailed in Chile for child sexual and other abuses.

He died in 2010 in prison at the age of 88.
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Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz called a crisis meeting late on Friday after two German newspapers published footage purportedly showing his deputy discussing state contracts with a potential Russian backer in return for political support.

Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache was filmed talking about the contracts with someone posing as the niece of a Russian oligarch in Ibiza in July, 2017, months before parliamentary elections, Der Spiegel and Sueddeutsche Zeitung said. 

Strache did not reply to a request for comment on the video. Reuters was not able to verify the authenticity of the footage independently, and the German newspapers did not say how they obtained it.

Kurz planned to make a statement on the case on Saturday, a government source told Reuters. The opposition called for Strache to resign.

Strache is head of the far-right Freedom Party (FPO), which became junior partner in a coalition with Kurz’s conservatives in December 2017 after winning 26 percent of the votes in the October elections.The FPO’s General Secretary, Christian Hafenecker, said the party’s lawyers were evaluating the material. Neither Strache nor the Freedom Party ever received or granted any benefits from the persons concerned, Hafenecker said in a statement.

“Since the video was obviously recorded illegally, we are also preparing appropriate legal steps.”

The footage, parts of which were posted by the newspapers, showed Strache and party colleague Johann Gudenus with the woman in a room in what the newspapers said was a villa in Ibiza.

The woman said she wanted to invest several hundred million euros in Austria, according to the newspapers. Strache and Gudenus discussed investment opportunities for her, including taking over a 50 percent stake in Austria’s influential tabloid Kronen Zeitung and using it to support Strache and the FPO party in the election.

Gudenus was not immediately available for comment.

“If she takes over the Kronen Zeitung three weeks before the election and get us into first place, then we can talk about everything,” Der Spiegel quoted Strache as saying in the video.

Strache held out the prospect of awarding her public contracts in road construction if she helped the Freedom Party succeed, according to the video.

Vienna prosecutors said they would study the reports and decide whether there was sufficient cause to open an investigation, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors said.
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Brexit talks appear to have collapsed a day after British Prime Minister Theresa May set out a timetable for her exit from office — the latest sign of a government in tatters.

Britain’s Labor party head Jeremy Corbyn has sent a letter to May saying the Brexit talks have “gone as far as they can” because of the instability of her government and its refusal to change its position. 

The two major British parties have been at a stalemate for weeks over a deal outlining the conditions by which Britain will withdraw from the European Union. The deadline for withdrawal was originally set for March 29, but the revised date — to give time for more negotiation — is Oct. 31.

Corbyn said in his letter to the prime minister that the two parties “have been unable to bridge important policy gaps between us.” He added, “Even more crucially, the increasing weakness and instability of (May’s) government means there cannot be confidence in securing whatever might be agreed” between the Tory and Labor parties.

Corbyn also told reporters Friday there is no chance of ratifying even a partial Brexit deal by July.

May has said the process is hampered by a lack of consensus among Labor party members about whether they want to deliver Brexit or hold a new referendum in hopes of stopping it.

Parliament has rejected May’s plan in three separate votes and is set to hold another vote in early June. While May has promised some tweaks to the bill before the next vote, the plan is not expected to undergo any radical changes — meaning the impasse between the lawmakers likely is to remain unchanged.

Conservative lawmaker and former London mayor Boris Johnson, who has led the Brexit movement and supports leaving the EU even without a plan in place, has announced he will stand for the prime minister’s position after May vacates it.
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