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An Armenian court on Friday announced the arrest of former president Robert Kocharyan, whom special investigators had recently charged with usurping power.

Yerevan City Court of General Jurisdiction announced Kocharyan’s detention less than a day after Armenian investigators filed a motion to have him arrested.

One of Kocharyan’s defense lawyers, Aram Orbelyan, refused to give any further details of the arrest, citing the confidentiality of the preliminary investigation. He said his team is preparing a response that will be read at a news conference July 28.

Mikael Harutyunyan, Kocharyan’s former defense chief, has also been charged in the case. It is not known whether he has been arrested.

Kocharyan’s arrest comes three months after a transfer of power in the ex-Soviet country following weeks of mass protests against corruption and cronyism.

Kocharyan served as Armenia’s second president from 1998 to 2008, and investigators have charged him with an attempt to overthrow the constitutional order during post-election events in March 2008 when his ally, Serzh Sarksyan, was elected the next president.

In February-March 2008 the opposition held protest rallies, contesting the results of the election and claiming that their candidate, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, had won the vote.

The protests were dispersed and 10 people were killed in clashes with police. The Constitutional Court upheld the election results.

Nikol Pashinyan, an opposition activist at the time who was imprisoned in June 2009 on charges of fomenting unrest during post-election protests, was elected prime minister by parliament on May 8 this year.

Kocharyan, who just returned from Europe, said the latest charges were politically motivated, but added he was ready to spend time in prison.

“These charges are fiction, fabricated, unjustified and have a political implication,” he told an independent Armenian Yerkir Media TV, adding that he would refuse to testify or cooperate with investigators “because of the trumped up nature of charges.”

However, Kocharyan said, he did not intend to run away.

“I’m going to go sit in prison and fight to the end.”

U.S. reaction

After the deadly clashes, the United States issued a report condemning what it called “arbitrary and unlawful killings.”

On Friday, a State Department spokesperson said: “The United States has consistently urged Armenia’s authorities to conduct a serious, credible and independent investigation into these events. We continue to stress to our Armenian partners the importance of respecting internationally recognized standards that relate to the administration of justice.”

Numerous allies of former presidents Sarksyan and Kocharyan have been involved in a series of unrelated anti-corruption probes launched under Pashinyan’s administration.

In a recent interview with VOA’s Armenian Service, Ararat Mirzoyan, Pashinyan’s deputy prime minister, said none of the anti-corruption probes are politically motivated.

“This is not our fault that the 99 percent of all discoveries deal with people from a certain political party,” he said. “That is the party that has been in power. That is the party that refused to transfer the power. That is the party that used all levers to extend their personal power. There is no intent there, rather just statistics. We said that there will be no political vendetta, and we are confident in that.”

This story originated in VOA’s Armenian Service. Some information is from Reuters.
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Five of the biggest emerging economies Thursday stood by the multilateral system and vowed to strengthen economic cooperation in the face of U.S. tariff threats and unilateralism.

The heads of the BRICS group — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — met in Johannesburg for an annual summit dominated by the risk of a U.S.-led trade war, although leaders did not publicly mention President Donald Trump by name.

“We express concern at the spill-over effects of macro-economic policy measures in some major advanced economies,” they said in joint statement.

“We recognize that the multilateral trading system is facing unprecedented challenges. We underscore the importance of an open world economy.”

​Trump tariffs

Trump has said he is ready to impose tariffs on all $500 billion (428 billion euros) of Chinese imports, complaining that China’s trade surplus with the U.S. is the result of unfair currency manipulation.

Trump has slapped levies on goods from China worth tens of billions of dollars, as well as tariffs on steel and aluminum from the EU, Canada and Mexico.

Xi and Putin

“We should stay committed to multilateralism,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said on the second day of the talks. “Closer economic cooperation for shared prosperity is the original purpose and priority of BRICS.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had a controversial meeting with Trump last week, echoed the calls for closer ties among BRICS members and for stronger trade within group.

“BRICS has a unique place in the global economy: This is the largest market in the world, the joint GDP is 42 percent of the global GDP and it keeps growing,” Putin said.

“In 2017, the trade with our BRICS countries has grown 30 percent, and we are aiming at further developing this kind of partnership.”

Erdogan attends

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is also attending the summit as the current chair of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and met with Putin on the sidelines Thursday.

“Our bilateral relations are improving certainly,” the Kremlin cited Putin as saying, hailing the two countries’ cooperation on Syria and in economic matters.

Erdogan in turn spoke about “rapidly developing bilateral relations,” according to the Kremlin, which did not elaborate.

The BRICS group, comprising more than 40 percent of the global population, represents some of the biggest emerging economies, but it has struggled to find a unified voice.

​US and EU deal

Analysts say U.S. trade policy could give the group renewed purpose.

In Washington, Trump and European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker announced an apparent truce in their trade war after White House talks Wednesday.

The U.S. and the EU will “immediately resolve” their dispute over U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs and subsequent EU countermeasures, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin confirmed Thursday.

The dollar gained against the euro after the announcement, helping to boost eurozone equities.

The punishing U.S. metals tariffs had angered Washington’s major trading partners, including the EU, and sparked retaliation against important American exports, spooking global stock markets.

Xi arrived in South Africa for the BRICS summit after visiting Senegal and Rwanda as part of a whistle-stop tour to cement relations with African allies.

On Friday, African leaders attending a “BRICS outreach” program will include Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Joao Lourenco of Angola, Macky Sall of Senegal and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.
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Armenian investigators on Thursday charged former President Robert Kocharyan with usurping power and filed a court motion to arrest him, the special investigation service said.

The move comes three months after a power change in the ex-Soviet country following weeks of mass protests against corruption and cronyism.

Kocharyan served as Armenia’s second president from 1998 to 2008 and investigators have charged him with an attempt to overthrow the constitutional order during post-election events in March 2008, when his ally Serzh Sarksyan was elected the next president.

In February-March 2008 the opposition held protest rallies, contesting the results of the election and claiming that their candidate, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, had won the vote.

The protests were dispersed and 10 people were killed in clashes with police. The Constitutional Court upheld the election results.

Nikol Pashinyan, an opposition activist at the time who was imprisoned in June 2009 on charges of fomenting unrest during post-election protests, was elected prime minister by parliament on May 8 this year.

Kocharyan said the latest charges were politically motivated, but added he was ready to spend time in prison.

“These charges are fiction, fabricated, unjustified and have a political implication,” he told an independent Armenian Yerkir Media TV.

Kocharyan also said the most likely development was his arrest, but he did not intend to run away.

“I’m going to go sit in prison and fight to the end.”
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The Moscow lawyer said to have promised Donald Trump’s presidential campaign dirt on his Democratic opponent worked more closely with senior Russian government officials than she previously let on, according to documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

Scores of emails, transcripts and legal documents paint a portrait of Natalia Veselnitskaya as a well-connected attorney who served as a ghostwriter for top Russian government lawyers and received assistance from senior Interior Ministry personnel in a case involving a key client.

The data were obtained through Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s London-based investigative unit, the Dossier Center, that is compiling profiles of Russians it accuses of benefiting from corruption. The data were later shared with journalists at the AP, the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, Greek news website Inside Story and others.

The AP was unable to reach Veselnitskaya for comment. Messages from a reporter sent to her phone were marked as “read” but were not returned. A list of questions sent via email went unanswered.

Veselnitskaya has been under scrutiny since it emerged last year that Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., met with her in June 2016 after being told by an intermediary that she represented the Russian government and was offering Moscow’s help defeating rival presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

‘Independent’ operator

Veselnitskaya has denied acting on behalf of Russian officialdom when she met with the Trump team, telling Congress that she operates “independently of any government bodies.”

But recent reporting has cast doubt on her story. In an April interview with NBC News, Veselnitskaya acknowledged acting as an “informant” for the Russian government after being confronted with an earlier batch of emails obtained through the Dossier Center.

The new documents reviewed by AP suggest her ties to Russian authorities are close — and they pull the curtain back on her campaign to overturn the sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Russian officials.

The source of the material is murky. Veselnitskaya has previously said that her emails were hacked. Khodorkovsky told AP he couldn’t know where the messages came from, saying his group maintained a series of anonymous digital drop boxes.

The AP worked to authenticate the 200-odd documents, in some cases by verifying the digital signatures carried in email headers. 

In three other cases, individuals named in various email chains confirmed that the messages were genuine. Other correspondence was partially verified by confirming the nonpublic phone numbers or email addresses they held, including some belonging to senior Russian officials and U.S. lobbyists.
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The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, is seeking access to Cameroon to verify what he says are alarming reports of horrific abuse by separatist and government forces in the country’s English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions.

The U.N. human rights office said the situation in Cameroon’s English-speaking communities has worsened considerably since protests against what the English-speakers see as structural discrimination started two years ago.

The Anglophones are demanding an end to what they allege is their economic and political marginalization by the country’s Francophone majority.

The High Commissioner’s spokeswoman, Ravina Shamdasani, told VOA what began as protests for greater access to jobs and linguistic equality has gotten out of hand. She said violence by both armed separatists and the government has spiraled out of control.

“The violent separatists, these armed groups are killing people, torching schools, carrying out kidnappings and extortion and all sorts of horrible human rights abuses to try to disrupt the situation,” she said. “The government’s role should be to protect people in such a horrible environment. Instead, the government is employing a heavy-handed response, which is not helping the situation. It is further causing human rights violations.”

United Nations figures show more than 21,000 refugees have fled to neighboring countries, while some 160,000 people are internally displaced by the violence, with many reportedly hiding in forests.

An army spokesman has rejected charges of abuses by the security forces as “rumors.”

Shamdasani said there is a lot of misinformation and propaganda on both sides. She added that the High Commissioner has asked that monitors be allowed to verify allegations of abuse against both security forces and armed separatists.

The government has rejected this request, she said. Consequently, she added that the U.N. human rights office will have to consider other options to keep tabs on the situation, including remote monitoring.
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The United States is threatening sanctions on Turkey unless a detained American pastor is released.

“If Turkey does not take immediate action to free this innocent man of faith and send him home to America, the United States will impose significant sanctions on Turkey until Pastor Andrew Brunson is free,” said U.S. Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday at a religious freedom summit at the State Department.

Andrew Brunson, an evangelical pastor from Black Mountain, North Carolina, has been jailed in Turkey on terrorism and espionage charges.His case has strained relations between Turkey and the U.S., both NATO allies.

“Release pastor Andrew Brunson now, or be prepared to face the consequences,” Pence warned.

Later Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump also weighed in on Twitter tweeting, “The United States will impose large sanctions on Turkey for their long time detainment of Pastor Andrew Brunson, a great Christian, family man and wonderful human being. He is suffering greatly. This innocent man of faith should be released immediately!”

Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu reacted to the warning Thursday, tweeting “No one dictates Turkey. We will never tolerate threats from anybody. Rule of law is for everyone; no exception.”

The exchange comes a day after Brunson was released from a Turkish prison and placed under house arrest while his trial continues.  

“This is a welcome first step. But it is not good enough,” added Pence who spoke with Brunson on Wednesday.  

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told American lawmakers that the release of Brunson from prison is an “indicator of diplomatic progress” but the “work is not done.”

Pompeo said Washington remains “in conversations with Turkey to bring home” the American pastor.

Brunson was indicted on charges of helping a network led by U.S.-based Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen, which Turkey blames for a failed 2016 coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

During the third and final day of the first-ever State Department ministerial to advance religious freedom, Pence and Pompeo also highlighted the plight of religious minorities across the globe.

The U.S. pledged an additional $ 17 million for de-mining efforts in the Ninewa region of Iraq, which is on top of the $90 million Washington provided in 2017.U.S. officials say the funding will help clear mines from areas with large populations of religious minorities who were subject to what Pence called genocide at the hands of Islamic State militants.

The summit has also focused on religious freedom issues in China, Myanmar and Iran.

The global situation “must change,” said Sam Brownback, U.S. ambassador at large for international religious freedom.

“In Burma, the situation in northern Rakhine state constitutes ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, a religious minority. In Iraq, religious minority groups of Yazidis and Christians victimized by ISIS [Islamic State terror group] are still in dire need of security and assistance. In Turkey, Pastor Andrew Brunson remains wrongfully imprisoned on false charges,” said Brownback on Tuesday during opening remarks of the ministerial.

“In China, a large number of Uighur Muslims are being sent to re-education camps, Tibetan Buddhists face significant restrictions in organizing their own faith and Christian house church leaders are imprisoned.”
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The International Olympic Committee hit back Thursday at the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) after its chief accused the IOC of failing to hold Russia accountable for doping in sports.

In a rebuke directed at USADA CEO Travis Tygart, the IOC chastised the US over its struggles in tackling doping in its domestic leagues and for refusing to join the international fight against corruption in sport.

Tygart had in testimony to a US agency that looks at human rights in Europe said that in allowing Russian athletes to take part in the Rio and Pyeongchang Olympic games, the IOC “chose not to stand up for clean athletes and against institutionalized doping.”

“We very much appreciate and welcome moves in the United States to step up the fight against doping and we assume that the very worrying existing challenges with some of the professional leagues in the United States will be addressed as a matter of urgency — especially since this has become extremely obvious again in the last report of USADA,” an IOC spokesman said in a statement sent to AFP.

According to Tygart, the IOC had assembled clear evidence of state-sponsored doping in Russia but missed an opportunity to combat “culture of corruption through doping in global sport”.

“When the decisive moment arrived … the IOC failed to lead.”

Replying to the USADA critique, the IOC said it “would kindly invite the United States government to join ‘The International Partnership against Corruption in Sport,'” a global network formed to clean up sports governance, which includes most major sporting powers, except the US.
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Belgian doctors have euthanized three minors in the past two years, according to a report from the nation’s chief euthanasia regulatory body released earlier this month.

The report, produced by Belgium’s Federal Commission for Euthanasia Control and Evaluation, said these three minors were the first to be euthanized since the country’s parliament voted to lift age restrictions on euthanasia in the country, the first such law in the world. Euthanasia for adults has been legal in Belgium since 2002.

“There is no age for suffering,” said Professor Wim Distelmans, chairman of the euthanasia committee. “Fortunately, euthanasia among young people remains very exceptional. Even if it were only one, the law would have been very useful. ”

The minors were 9, 11 and 17 years old, according to the report. Their conditions ranged from muscular dystrophy to brain tumors to cystic fibrosis. The conditions of all three were determined to be terminal, and euthanasia was approved unanimously by the committee.

The report, part of a series released by the committee every two years, examined all euthanasia cases within Belgium from January 2016 to December 2017. The report said 4,337 euthanizations were administered in Belgium during that time. The majority of euthanizations — 2,781 — were for cancer patients. The second leading cause was “poly-pathologies,” ranging from dementia and heart disease to incontinence and hearing loss, with 710 euthanizations listing “poly-pathology” as its primary reason.

Euthanasia cases rising

Since euthanasia was first legalized in Belgium in 2002, the number of deaths from it have steadily increased every year. In 2016, the report found, the number of people who died via euthanasia was 2,028. In 2017, that number jumped to 2,309, nearly a 14 percent increase.

The Netherlands and Belgium are the only two countries in the world that permit the euthanasia of minors. The Netherlands, however, restricts euthanasia to minors above the age of 12.

The 2014 law stipulated that before euthanasia can be considered for a minor, he or she must be suffering from terminal illness, face “unbearable physical suffering” and repeatedly request to die.

“The law says adolescents cannot make important decisions on economic or emotional issues, but suddenly they’ve become able to decide that someone should make them die,” said Andre-Joseph Leonard, head of the Catholic Church in Belgium, following the passage of the 2014 law.

In 2017, a doctor resigned from Belgium’s euthanasia commission, alleging that the committee had euthanized a demented patient who had not formally requested to die. 
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Turkey is expanding its economic and cultural influence over the Balkans, and analysts say the strategy, which targets the region’s large Muslim minorities, is worrying some of its Western allies.

The Balkan region was the center of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. That historical legacy has made the area a priority for Turkey’s ruling AKP under recently re-elected President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey’s growing influence was visible at this month’s inauguration ceremony of Erdogan. While Western European leaders stayed away, five heads of state from the Balkans attended.

“Since AKP has this mental construction of re-establishing the Ottoman past, it’s [the Balkan region is] important for them,” said professor Istar Gozaydin, who has studied the Balkans extensively.

“The Balkans as a region, as it has for so many centuries, was under the Ottoman rule and influence. I do see the renaissance of Islamic identity of Turkish influence in the region,” said international relations professor Huseyin Bagci, an expert on the Balkans at Ankara’s Middle East Technical University.

“Turkey is using smart power there culturally, economically and language-wise,” he continued. “When you look to those Turks living in the Balkans, they get more and more under the increasing Turkish influence.”

Some European leaders are already voicing concern. “I don’t want a Balkans that turns toward Turkey or Russia,” French President Emmanuel Macron declared in May. Erdogan quickly shot back, saying the comment was “unbecoming of a statesman.”

The Turkish economy dwarfs those of its Balkan neighbors, and economic muscle is at the forefront of Ankara’s projection of influence. “Turkey is building airports, even investing in several sectors, like in Bulgaria and Romania, from textiles to many others,” Bagci said.

“There is an aggressive economic policy toward the Balkan countries, which cannot compete with Turkey,” Bagci said. “In the Balkans, we have two big countries getting influence. One is Germany and the other one Turkey.”

Trade has helped Ankara overcome past animosities. “These countries, many of them, don’t have automatic access to the EU [European Union], and many of them look to Turkey for trade,” said columnist Semih Idiz of the Al Monitor website.

‘Quite close’

“During the recent Balkan war, Turkey and Serbia were at opposite ends of the fence. They looked at one another with great enmity. Today, we see Serbia and Turkey are quite close, despite differences over Kosovo and Bosnia and things like that. A country like Serbia values its friendship with Turkey, and I think it applies to a certain extent to countries like Croatia, too,” Idiz said. He was referring to the events that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Serbia is now Turkey’s main Balkan trading partner, with $1 billion in commerce.

Reaching out to the Balkans’ large ethnic Turkish population, through the promotion of religion and cultural awareness, is also an essential tool deployed by Ankara.

“They are using religion. They are using diplomacy. Institutions like Tika and Diyanet have been working quite efficiently and hard in the region,” Gozaydin said.

Tika is the Turkish state’s development agency, while the Diyanet administers Turkey’s Islamic affairs nationally and internationally. The two institutions are at the forefront of expanding Turkish influence in the Balkans.

“They work with the authorities in those countries. They try to influence the politics there,” Gozaydin said. “In Bosnia, they are trying, for example, to be influential in the appointment of religious authorities so they can work together.”

Turkey has been funding mosque projects across the Balkans, including two of the region’s largest mosques in Albania and Bulgaria. Turkish cultural foundations also work to promote ethnic Turkish identity.

While Ankara has been successful in projecting its influence, there are signs of growing unease, Gozaydin warned. She said she had met quite a few people in the Balkans, including some authorities, “who were not happy with Turkey trying too hard to have an influence on them. So that was considered to be an interference in their domestic politics.”

‘Grave concern’

Last year, the United States voiced alarm about Ankara’s policy. “The Balkans is an area of grave concern now,” said then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster.

Ankara dismissed such criticism, contending that it was only re-establishing cultural ties that date back centuries and claiming that Russia and other European countries were jockeying for influence in the Balkans. In May, European officials held talks with western Balkan leaders in Bulgaria to reaffirm the “European perspective” of that region.

Given the Balkans’ recent history of ethnic and religious conflict, however, analysts warn of the risk of a nationalist backlash if Ankara does not tread carefully.

“The Turkish minorities, or Muslim minorities, yes, they are always considered as a potential threat by the majority of the Balkan countries,” Bagci said. “The more the Muslim identity gets stronger, the more populist movements in the Balkans, like in Germany and other countries, will increase and get stronger. This is the potential conflict.”
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Hundreds of people on Wednesday attended an emotional funeral service for Hatidza Mehmedovic, who headed a group of women fighting for justice for the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

The somber crowd stood in silence and many cried during a commemoration ceremony and a Muslim religious service held in the eastern Bosnian town that was the site of Europe’s worst carnage since World War II.

Mehmedovic, who headed the Mothers of Srebrenica group comprising women who lost their loved ones in the massacre, was buried later in a village near the town.

The Mothers of Srebrenica have won praise for their struggle to have those responsible for the killings brought to justice.

“Today we are all sad, everyone who knew Hatidza, everyone who knows what the word ‘mother’ means,” said Munira Subasic, another women heading the quest for justice. “She wanted to send the message of peace, message of respect to others. She was seeking only one thing and that was the truth and justice.”

Mehmedovic’s husband, two sons and brother were among some 8,000 Muslim men and boys killed when Bosnian Serbs overran Srebrenica in July 1995.

More than two decades later, experts are still excavating victims’ bodies from hidden mass graves throughout Bosnia.

The U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has sentenced Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, over the Srebrenica massacre and other atrocities of the 1992-95 war.

Although an international court has labeled the Srebrenica killings as genocide, Serbs have never admitted their troops committed the ultimate crime and nationalist politicians have viewed Mladic and Karadzic as heroes.

A Serbian far-right lawmaker, Vjerica Radeta, has sparked outrage this week with a tweet mocking Mehmedovic’s tragedy after her death. The tweet was widely shared on social networks and reported by the media before it was deleted, and Radeta’s Twitter account shut down.

Serbia’s parliament speaker Maja Gojkovic has said Radeta’s position does not reflect that of the assembly.
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Tariffs are set to top the agenda in a meeting Wednesday between U.S. President Donald Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Juncker is coming to Washington with the hopes the European Union can avoid an all-out trade war by convincing Trump to hold off punitive tariffs on European cars. The potential car tariffs would hurt Germany’s thriving automobile industry and come on top of hefty tariffs that Trump has already imposed on aluminum and steel imports.

But on the eve of the meeting, Trump appeared pessimistic the two sides would come to any agreement after the U.S. leader threatened more tariffs on U.S. trading partners. In a tweet late Tuesday, Trump said both the United States and the European Union should drop all tariffs, barriers and subsidies.

“That would finally be called Free Market and Fair Trade!” Trump said. “Hope they do it, we are ready — but they won’t!” he added.

Earlier Tuesday, the U.S. president declared “Tariffs are the greatest!” and threatened to impose additional penalties on U.S. trading partners. “Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on trade negotiates a fair deal, or it gets hit with tariffs. It’s as simple as that.”

Trump again complained the world uses the United States as a “piggy bank” that everyone likes to rob. 

The European Commission has responded with retaliatory tariffs, but new levies on cars could prompt Europe to take further action.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Tuesday Europe won’t cave in to Trump’s threats.

“No one has an interest in having punitive tariffs, because everyone loses in the end,” Maas wrote on Twitter. “Europe will not be threatened by President Trump If we cede once, we will often have to deal with such behavior in the future.”

Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan told reporters Tuesday he does not think “the tariff route is the smart way to go.”

Ryan said he understands Trump is seeking “a better deal for Americans” but added the U.S. should instead “work together to reduce trade barriers and trade restrictions between our countries.”
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The top U.S. official for Ukraine negotiations doubled down on recent assurances from the State Department and White House that President Donald Trump did not reach any agreements on Ukraine during last week’s two-hour private meeting with his Russian counterpart in Helsinki, Finland.

Russian President Vladimir Putin last week told a gathering of diplomats in Moscow that he and Trump discussed the possibility of an internationally supervised referendum in pro-Russian separatist regions of eastern Ukraine, a claim later reiterated by the Kremlin’s ambassador to the U.S.

In an exclusive interview with VOA’s Ukrainian service, Kurt Volker, U.S. special representative for Ukraine negotiations, said that Kremlin remarks about the referendum were not only misleading but also blatantly implausible.

“There was no move toward recognition of Russia’s claimed annexation of Crimea. No support for a referendum. No movement toward Russia’s position on a protection force for [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] monitors that would effectively divide the country,” said Volker, referring to Russia’s controversial September 2017 U.N. proposal.

Because referendums aren’t part of the 2015 Minsk agreement, which aims to end the conflict, secure a cease-fire and pave the way for regional elections, Volker said any direct vote on secession from Kyiv would lack the necessary legal framework.

“So, a lot of things that people were worried about or had predicted might happen [in Helsinki] did not happen. So, I don’t think there’s really any basis to be worried here,” he said, noting that the administration has continued to maintain sanctions on Russia in concert with European allies and approved weapons sales to Kyiv.

The Pentagon, he added, recently unveiled plans for a new military financing package for the occupied Eastern European country.

“Let me just say this — that on all of the issues that Ukrainians would care about, nothing was given away,” he said. “No handing over of gifts to Russia at Ukraine’s expense.”

Volker’s comments supplemented initial reactions by Garrett Marquis, U.S. National Security Council spokesman, who said the White House was “not considering” supporting a referendum in eastern Ukraine, and a statement by U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, who said an eastern Ukraine referendum “would have no legitimacy.”

The comments by the trio of U.S. officials followed days of speculation about what was discussed at the rare one-on-one meeting between the U.S. and Russian leaders with only their translators present.

Trump has been on the defensive over the summit since returning from Helsinki, especially during a key moment when he was asked about Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election as Putin stood beside him.

This story originated in VOA’s Ukrainian service.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin, accused of interfering in U.S. elections, will not be invited to address Congress or visit the Capitol if he accepts President Donald Trump’s invitation to come to Washington, Republican congressional leaders said on Tuesday.

The comments by House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reflect the unease among U.S. lawmakers, including Trump’s fellow Republicans, about the president’s outreach to Putin after their July 16 summit in Helsinki.

Ryan and McConnell rejected the idea of Putin being asked to address a joint session of Congress, typically considered an honor for visiting foreign leaders.

“We would certainly not be giving him an invitation to do a joint session,” Ryan added. “That’s something we reserve for allies.”

“The speaker and I have made it clear that Putin will not be welcome up here at the Capitol,” McConnell said later.

The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia used a campaign of propaganda and hacking to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to aid Trump’s candidacy, and has warned that Moscow is working to meddle in the November congressional elections.

“The Russians better quit messing around in our elections,” McConnell told reporters, adding that he was open to legislation to put pressure on Moscow. “They did it the last time. They better not do it again.”

Ryan said he did not have a problem with Trump sitting down with foreign leaders like Putin, as long as he was delivering the right message.

“If the message is, ‘Stop meddling in our country, stop violating our sovereignty,’ then I support that. But it’s the message that counts,” Ryan told reporters.

Trump faced bipartisan criticism after a news conference with Putin in Helsinki where he gave credence to Putin’s denials of Russian interference in the 2016 election despite the findings of the U.S. intelligence community. Putin acknowledged at the news conference he wanted Trump to win the election against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton but has denied election meddling.

Trump has called the summit a success and invited Putin to

visit Washington in the autumn.

Some Republicans expressed fresh skepticism about a Putin visit. Representative Mac Thornberry, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said, “I’m suspicious of everything Putin does.”

Trump faced withering criticism after the Putin summit, including from former CIA Director John Brennan, who described the president’s performance as “nothing short of treasonous.”

The White House said on Monday Trump was looking at revoking the security clearances of Brennan and five other former officials who have been critical of the president.

Ryan downplayed Trump’s threat.

“I think he’s trolling people, honestly,” Ryan said.
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In the pre-Internet era, spies faced more challenges than now when trying to infiltrate Western political circles in order to gather information, identify potential recruits, enlist the assistance of sympathizers and mount active operations, like meddling in a foreign country’s election.

Now they have the benefit of Facebook and LinkedIn and other social-media networking sites to expand their contacts, say former and current U.S. and British intelligence officials.

Western governments accuse Russian intelligence services of exploiting widely for propaganda purposes social media platforms, where they can plant “fake news,” deepen political discord in adversary states and mount influence campaigns in a bid to shape Western public opinion. But Russian spies — as opposed to trolls — are using networking sites also in highly sophisticated ways to work their way into Western political circles.

Maria Butina, the latest flame-haired Russian female alleged spy who U.S. prosecutors believe they have unmasked, is an object lesson in how social media can assist covert influence operations — and not solely as propaganda platforms aimed at swaying or warping public opinion, says a U.S. counter-intelligence official who asked not to be identified for this article.

In the pre-Internet era Russian influence-peddlers had to make do with trawling for “targets” at think tank and embassy events, political conferences and trade fairs. But now they can combine the physical and virtual. “Butina was using old tradecraft, turning up at political events, making contacts and then befriending them on Facebook or LinkedIn and vice versa. Social media platforms are useful in mapping out friendship networks and opening doors,” he adds.

Butina, aged 29, was charged last week with acting as an agent for the Kremlin in the United States. The Justice Department alleges she was in regular contact with Russian intelligence services. She has been indicted for conspiracy to operate on behalf of the Russian government and failing to register as a foreign agent. She has not been formally charged with espionage — most likely as her role was not to steal state and military secrets but to insinuate her way into U.S. political circles in ways useful for Russia’s foreign-policy aims, including deepening partisanship in Western countries and opening up avenues of influence.

Federal prosecutors accuse Butina of conspiring with two American citizens, one of whom she cohabited with, and a top Russian official to influence U.S. policy toward Russia by infiltrating the National Rifle Association gun rights group and other conservative special interest groups potentially influential on the Trump administration.

U.S. prosecutors allege in a memorandum filed in support of a request for Butina to be held in detention while she awaits trial that the Russian gun-rights activist “maintained contact information for individuals identified as employees of the Russian FSB.” Additionally, prosecutors claim FBI surveillance observed Butina having a private meal with a Russian diplomat whom the U.S. government expelled in March 2018 for suspicion of being a Russian intelligence officer.

From court papers filed by U.S. prosecutors last week it remains unclear whether her operation was initiated by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, or whether it was conceived by her patron, Alexander Torshin, a Russian central banker, as a way to boost himself within the Kremlin administration, with the FSB only getting involved subsequently.

A former British counter-intelligence officer says that’s a distinction without much meaning in a Kremlin administration seeded with so-called siloviki, Russian intelligence officers who have formally left the security agencies but are considered still active by Western intelligence officials. Many occupy high-ranking positions in the government of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB officer.

Among the more traditional tradecraft techniques Butina allegedly used was offering sex to cozy up to U.S. politicians and lobbyists; in one case, according to U.S. prosecutors, to try to secure a job with an American special interest organization she had targeted. She lived with a Republican political operative twice her age. He has been identified in U.S. media as lobbyist Paul Erickson. She chafed, though, at the cohabitation, and, according to prosecutors she treated the relationship “as simply a necessary aspect of her activities.”

Butina has pled not guilty. Her lawyer, Robert Driscoll, says all she was doing was trying to help improve relations between the United States and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And he denies she’s a spy, telling CNN Friday that much of the case against her was “taken completely out of context.”

Butina, who came to the United States in 2014 on a student visa, founded a pro-gun group in Russia called Right to Bear Arms and used gun activism in what U.S. prosecutors allege was a “calculated, patient” plan directed by Torshin to infiltrate the NRA and conservative special interest groups to make inroads into American political circles. Social media platforms were highly useful in the endeavor as she cut a swathe through U.S. conservative politics, boasting on her Facebook page of meetings with, among others, former Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Scott Walker, the current Wisconsin governor.

In one e-mail to Butina, disclosed in court papers, Torshin praised her efforts, comparing them to Kremlin agent Anna Chapman, another flame-haired Russian who gained international notoriety after her 2010 arrest in the United States. Chapman and a handful of other Russians were deported to Russia in July 2010, as part of a prisoner exchange. “You have upstaged Anna Chapman,” Torshin declared.

Journalist Michael Isikoff at Yahoo News had a front seat view of Butina’s methods. He co-authored with David Corn the book “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story Of Putin’s War On America And The Election Of Donald Trump” and had been tracking Butina’s activities.

He said she and Torshin had been making efforts to influence American conservative political organizations. He told the American public broadcaster NPR in an interview: “As we reported in the book — David Corn and I — there’s a Republican lobbyist who remembers being approached by her at a CPAC conference — Conservative Political Action Conference — and just being struck by how solicitous she was, how she wanted to stay in touch with him and become his Facebook friend. And this is a somewhat elderly gentleman, balding, wasn’t used to this kind of attention from a young, attractive Russian woman.”

Hiding in plain sight on the Internet, using overtly social media networking platforms holds risks, too. Being active on Facebook increases the chance of exposure, prompting the attention of counter-intelligence watchers, as well as journalists. In an e-mail exchange with VOA, Isikoff noted, he “friended’ her [on Facebook] in order to get in touch so I could interview her.”

And a U.S. counter-intelligence official says Butina drew attention to herself as much by her social media activity as her physical activities. So much so that she was called to testify earlier this year by the Senate Intelligence Committee, during which, according to CNN she disclosed her gun activism received funding from Russian billionaire Konstantin Nikolaev, another Kremlin-tied oligarch.

The Butina case is adding to an unfolding picture of a sophisticated and disruptive covert Russian influence campaign in the United States and the West, with the Kremlin targeting both sides of the political spectrum, say Western officials. In Soviet times, Moscow focused on far-left parties and nuclear-disarmament groups, but as a 2014 report by the Budapest-based think tank Political Capital noted, the Kremlin in recent years has become more sophisticated, courting overtly and covertly groups on the populist right of the Western political spectrum as well as the left.

The politically ambidextrous nature now of Russian intelligence and influence campaigns was dramatically captured during the 10th anniversary celebrations of the Kremlin-funded RT broadcaster in December 2015, when Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was an invitee to a gala dinner. She sat at the same table as President Putin — along with Gen. Mike Flynn, who served briefly as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, before pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts he had with Russian officials during Trump’s presidential transition.
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Fire officials in Greece said Tuesday at least 49 people have been killed and more than 140 injured in wildfires raging through resort towns near the country’s capital.

Regional authorities have declared a state of emergency in areas east and west of Athens and deployed the army to help fight the blazes.

Athens has asked the European Union for aerial and ground support to help battle the flames. Greece said Cyprus offered to send firefighters, while Spain offered water-dropping aircraft. BBC News reported countries, including Italy, Germany, Poland and France, have sent planes, vehicles and firefighters.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras cut short a visit to Bosnia on Monday and returned to Athens to preside over an emergency-response meeting.

“We are doing everything humanly possible to try and tackle these fires,” Tsipras said. “What concerns us is that there are fires occurring simultaneously.”

The first fire broke out in a pine forest near the small town of Kineta, 50 kilometers west of Athens.

Three communities were evacuated, and the blaze shut down a nearly 20-kilometer section of a major highway.

High temperatures of up to 40 degrees Celsius have been predicted for Greece, and authorities have warned that the risk of forest fires is high. Wind gusts of up to 80 kph were hampering efforts to contain the blazes.

Another fire was burning northeast of Athens, in the Penteli area, moving into the town of Rafina. The mayor of Rafina estimated at least 100 homes have been destroyed.

The Greek coast guard sent boats to the area to evacuate residents trapped on the beach by the flames. It was also searching for a boat reported missing that was said to be carrying Danish tourists fleeing the fires.

A local fire chief went on state TV to appeal to people to leave the area after some tried to stay in their properties.

“People should leave, close up their homes and just leave. People cannot tolerate so much smoke for so many hours,” Achilleas Tzouvaras said. “This is an extreme situation.” 
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A former senior security aide for French President Emmanuel Macron is insisting he was trying to help police when he was caught on video assaulting a protester at a May Day demonstration.

The outcry sparked by the video is the most damaging scandal to hit Macron since he took office last year.

The former security aide, Alexandre Benalla, who was fired by Macron on Friday, said Monday his action was “vigorous but without violence and caused no injury,” according to a statement released by his lawyers.

“This personal initiative … is obviously being used to tarnish the president in circumstances that defy comprehension,” the statement read.

Benalla, along with another member of Macron’s ruling party, Vincent Crase, were charged Sunday with violence, interfering in the exercise of public office and the unauthorized public display of official insignia.

The video made public by Le Monde newspaper last week shows Benalla, who is not a police officer, wearing a police helmet with visor as well as a police armband while dragging a woman away from the crowd and later beating a male protester as riot police looked on while breaking up a May Day protest in Paris.

Benalla said in the statement issued by his lawyers Monday that the man and woman he was filmed scuffling with were “particularly virulent individuals” whom he had been trying to “bring under control” while “lending a hand” to police.

On Monday, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb told lawmakers he took no action against Benalla after the presidency assured him in early May that Benalla would be punished.

Three high-ranking police officers have been charged with misappropriation of the images and violating professional secrecy for illegally giving Benalla video surveillance footage of the incidents to help him try to clear his name. They have been suspended from their jobs.

Benalla, 26, handled Macron’s campaign security and has remained close to the president.
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Russian investigators said Monday they had detained six prison guards over a video showing officers brutally beating an inmate which was leaked to an independent newspaper.

The group of prison service employees, “acting deliberately, clearly exceeding their official powers, used violence against a prisoner,” investigators said.

Human rights activists regularly report torture, humiliation and beatings in Russian prisons, but the leak of such an explicit video is rare.

The branch of the Investigative Committee for the Volga city of Yaroslavl, where the video was shot at a penal colony, said “today six people have already been detained.”

“The criminals delivered multiple blows with hands, feet and unidentified objects to the man’s torso and limbs,” it said in a statement.

The 10-minute video posted by the Novaya Gazeta newspaper on Friday shows a group of 18 uniformed men methodically beating a man who is pinned down on a table as he groans and pleads for mercy. They also pour water on his head.

The prisoner, named as Yevgeny Makarov, was left covered with bruises and cuts on his legs which were swollen and infected, his lawyer wrote in a report quoted in the newspaper.

Makarov said he lost consciousness several times.

The video clearly shows the men’s faces. Novaya Gazeta reported that it was shot in June 2017 but criminal action was only launched after the publication of the video.

Investigators said they had identified all those involved and were going through legal procedures to detain the rest of the participants.

They said that they would also look at the actions of the prison governor and top regional prison officials.

The video was shot with a portable video recorder that according to the law prison officers are obliged to carry.

The prisoner is still in jail but has been visited by a rights ombudsman and is relatively safe in a one-man cell, his lawyer Irina Biryukova told the Russian channel TV Rain.

Threats from guards

Rights group Public Verdict, which passed the video to Novaya Gazeta, said Monday that Biryukova has fled Russia after receiving threats and had asked for state protection for family members.

Biryukova told TV Rain that a reliable source in the region had informed her that prison guards had voiced personal threats against her.

“For my safety, we decided that it was necessary for me to leave Russia for the meantime,” she said.

Amnesty International called on Russian authorities to “act immediately” to protect the lawyer.

“The launch of the investigation into the allegations of torture is a welcome first step towards justice,” the rights group said in a statement.

“However, in the absence of a national mechanism which systematically works to prevent torture, the criminal case against Makarov’s torturers will be an exception to the rule.”

Biryukova said she was hopeful that the publicity around the case would lead to more arrests and eventual sentences, and that she would return to Russia soon.

The regional Investigative Committee told TASS state news agency it was checking into threats against Biryukova and could launch criminal action.

The case is not the first allegation of brutality against prisoners to emerge from the Yaroslavl colony.

Last year, Novaya Gazeta reported an inmate who was sentenced for taking part in protests against the return of Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin in 2012 was tortured there in a punishment cell.

 
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U.S. President Donald Trump said Monday that he “gave up nothing” to Russian President Vladimir Putin at last week’s summit in Helsinki, but details of their one-on-one meeting remained elusive.

“We merely talked about future benefits for both countries,” Trump said on Twitter. “Also, we got along very well, which is a good thing except for the Corrupt Media!”

He blamed the mainstream news media, “Fake News” as he called it again, for “talking negatively” about his meeting with Putin.

Trump and Putin met behind closed doors for more than two hours with only their translators in the room with them. At various times since then, Trump has said that the two leaders talked about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, stopping global terrorism, security for Israel, the need to curb a nuclear arms race between their countries, Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, cyberattacks, trade, Middle East peace, North Korea’s nuclear weapons and more.

But details of what Trump and Putin may have decided have not emerged. Trump late last week invited Putin to visit the White House in a few months for a second summit.

Criticism of Helsinki performance

Back home from the first one, the U.S. leader drew widespread criticism – from Trump’s fellow Republicans and opposition Democrats alike – for his performance at the joint news conference he had with Putin, where Trump embraced Putin’s “extremely strong and powerful” denial that Russia had meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, rather than defending the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Moscow had interfered.

Trump has voiced a mix of comments since Helsinki, saying he accepted the U.S. intelligence finding of Russian election interference, while coupling it with continued denials that his campaign colluded with Russia.

By Sunday night, however, Trump was calling the Russian interference story “all a big hoax,” and blaming former president Barack Obama for not intervening to stop it because Obama thought Democrat Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump in the election two years ago.

“So President Obama knew about Russia before the Election,” Trump tweeted. “Why didn’t he do something about it? Why didn’t he tell our campaign? Because it is all a big hoax, that’s why, and he thought Crooked Hillary was going to win!!!”

​

Mueller probe

On Monday, Trump railed against special counsel Robert Mueller’s 14-month investigation of whether Trump’s campaign worked directly with Moscow to help him win and whether he obstructed justice by firing Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey last year at a time when Comey was leading the agency’s Russia probe before Mueller was appointed to take it over.

The U.S. leader attacked the FBI for four times winning approval from a surveillance court to wiretap Carter Page, one of his former advisers, about his suspected ties to Russia, one of the underpinnings of the Mueller probe. Page has not been charged and on Sunday told CNN the allegations that he was conscripted by Russia are “ridiculous” and not true.

Trump called the Mueller probe “a disgrace to America. They should drop the discredited Mueller Witch Hunt now!”

 
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The President of Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic Milorad Dodik pushed on Monday to reopen debate over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, less than three months before the country votes in elections.

Dodik launched a procedure demanding that parliament revoke a 2004 report issued by a previous government which established that Bosnian Serb forces killed about 8,000 Muslims in and around the town during the country’s 1992-95 war.

Critics accused Dodik of trying to use the issue of Europe’s worst atrocity since World War Two to win the votes of hardline Bosnian Serbs in the October 7 general election.

Dodik has always rejected rulings by two war crimes courts – The U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and The International Court of Justice – that the atrocity qualified as genocide.

Though acknowledging the crime occurred, Dodik said the numbers of those killed had been exaggerated in the 2004 report.

A special session of parliament to debate the report will be held on August 14, a parliamentary panel, which convened at Dodik’s request, said on Monday.

Dodik said earlier that the report had been manipulated to harm the Serbs and that he wanted it overturned. Before this, Srebrenica survivors sent to German authorities a list of Serbs alleged to have participated in the massacre, many of whom are still at large. Many Bosnians settled in Germany after the war, one of a series of conflicts as Yugoslavia broke up.

Bosnian Serb forces, led by General Ratko Mladic, took over the U.N.-protected enclave of Srebrenica on July 11, 1995. They separated men from women, detained them and killed them en masse in the following days.

Last year, the ICTY convicted Mladic of genocide and crimes against humanity, including at Srebrenica, and jailed him for life.

Bosnian Muslim deputies in the Serb Republic parliament condemned Dodik’s initiative.

“The initiative … is shameful when even the birds in the trees know what happened in Srebrenica. Dodik has no such eraser that can overturn the local and international rulings related to Srebrenica,” one of them, Mujo Hadziomerovic, said.

Dodik, who seeks the secession of the Serb Republic from Bosnia, will run for the Serb seat in the country’s inter-ethnic presidency in October.

Political analyst Tanja Topic said Bosnian parties in general were using such issues to win support. “This is a well-tried political recipe that the ruling parties have been using in their election campaign to mobilize voters around the nationalist agenda on the one side and to discredit their political opponents on the other,” she told Reuters.

After the war, Bosnia was split into the Serb Republic and a federation of Muslim Bosniaks and Roman Catholic Croats, linked via a weak central government.

 
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Spanish rescuers have picked up nearly 800 migrants trying the cross the Mediterranean Sea into the European Union over the past two days.

Coast Guard boats pulled people off of dangerously overcrowded vessels from the Straits of Gibraltar and the Alboran Sea – two of the closest points between Spain the coast of North Africa.

The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration said more than 18,000 people have reached Spain from North Africa so far this year.

Spain has replaced Italy as the preferred destination for migrants from Africa, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere trying to escape war and poverty for a better life in the European Union.

Italy had been overwhelmed with migrants and under a deal worked out with Libya, has started returning them home instead of processing asylum requests.

 
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Professional golfer Francesco Molinari won his first major championship Sunday, defeating an array of the sport’s top stars at the British Open in Carnoustie, Scotland.

The 35-year-old Molinari became the first Italian to capture one of golf’s four major annual titles, shooting a final round 2-under-par 69. He completed a bogey-free round with a 5-foot birdie putt on the 18th hole and then waited to claim the tournament’s Claret Jug trophy as other contenders faltered at the end.

For the tournament, Molinari was 8 under par, two better than a quartet of golfers, Britain’s Justin Rose, Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy and two Americans, Xander Schauffele and Kevin Kisner.

The tourney marked the return to prominence for Tiger Woods, the U.S. golfer who has won 14 major championships but none since 2008. With a pair of birdies and eight pars through the first 10 holes Sunday, Woods surged into the lead, but promptly relinquished it with a double bogey on the 11th and a bogey on the 12th.

Woods completed the tourney in sixth place, three shots back of Molinari, his playing partner. It was Woods’ best showing in a major championship since his fourth-place finish at the 2013 Masters in the United States.

 
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On the heels of President Donald Trump’s widely-criticized Helsinki summit performance, Washington is abuzz yet again after the White House announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit the United States later this year. VOA’s Michael Bowman has this report.
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Britain will only pay its EU divorce bill if the bloc agrees to the framework for a future trade deal, the new Brexit secretary warned in an interview published Sunday.

Dominic Raab, who replaced David Davis after he quit the role earlier this month in protest over the government’s Brexit strategy, said “some conditionality between the two” was needed.

He added that the Article 50 mechanism used to trigger Britain’s imminent exit from the European Union provided for new deal details.

“Article 50 requires, as we negotiate the withdrawal agreement, that there’s a future framework for our new relationship going forward, so the two are linked,” Raab told the Sunday Telegraph.

“You can’t have one side fulfilling its side of the bargain and the other side not, or going slow, or failing to commit on its side. So I think we do need to make sure that there’s some conditionality between the two,” he said.

Doubt cast

Prime Minister Theresa May agreed in December to a financial settlement totaling £35 to £39 billion ($46-51 billion, 39-44 billion euros) that ministers said depended on agreeing on future trade ties.

But Cabinet members have since cast doubt on the position. 

Finance minister Philip Hammond said shortly afterward that he found it “inconceivable” Britain would not pay its bill, which he described as “not a credible scenario.”

The country is set to leave the bloc on March 30, but the two sides want to strike a divorce agreement by late October in order to give parliament enough time to endorse a deal.

Raab met the EU’s top negotiator Michel Barnier for the first time on Friday, where he heard doubts over May’s new Brexit blueprint for the future relationship.

But Barnier noted the priority in talks should be on finalizing the initial divorce deal.

May’s plan unpopular

A hard-line stance by the British government on the financial settlement could complicate progress, with Raab insisting on the link with the bill and a future agreement.

May’s plans formally unveiled in early July envisions a customs partnership for goods and a common rulebook with the EU.

It has faced severe criticism in Britain, including from within her own Cabinet and Conservative Party.

Former foreign secretary Boris Johnson and Davis both resigned in opposition.
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An unusual pop-up museum in Lisbon is delighting social media-focused visitors with colorful and dreamy displays of giant ice creams, marshmallow pools and all things sweet. As VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports, the museum’s founders say its an attraction that strives to put a smile on the faces of all its visitors.
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Fiat Chrysler named on Saturday its Jeep division boss, Mike Manley, to take over immediately for Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne, who is seriously ill after suffering major complications following surgery.

The carmaker said British-born Manley, who also takes responsibility for the North America region, will push ahead with the midterm strategy outlined last month by Marchionne, who had been due to step down next April.

Marchionne, 66, was credited with rescuing Fiat and Chrysler from bankruptcy after taking the Italian carmaker’s wheel in 2004. On Saturday, he was also replaced as chairman and CEO of Ferrari and chairman of tractor maker CNH Industrial — both spun off from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles in recent years.

“FCA communicates with profound sorrow that during the course of this week unexpected complications arose while Mr. Marchionne was recovering from surgery and that these have worsened significantly in recent hours,” the statement said.

FCA disclosed earlier this month that Marchionne, a renowned dealmaker and workaholic, was recovering from a shoulder operation. But his condition deteriorated sharply in recent days when he suffered massive complications that were not divulged.

Ferrari named FCA Chairman and Agnelli family scion John Elkann as new chairman, while board member Louis Camilleri becomes chief executive. CNH appointed Suzanna Heywood to replace Marchionne as chairman. All three companies remain controlled by the Agnellis.

Marchionne had previously said he planned to stay on as Ferrari chairman and CEO until 2021.

Deal focus

One of the auto industry’s longest-serving CEOs, Marchionne has advocated tie-ups to share the growing cost burden of developing cleaner, electrified and autonomous vehicles.

He resisted the comparatively easy option of selling off coveted brands such as Jeep, saying that would leave too big a problem with Fiat as “the stump that is left behind.”

But after being rejected by his preferred partner General Motors, he turned back to the task of cutting FCA’s debt — a goal he achieved last month — while maintaining that a merger for FCA was “ultimately inevitable.”

Investor hopes for a transformative deal had largely dwindled and are unlikely to hit the shares on Marchionne’s departure, according to Evercore analyst George Galliers.

“The valuation doesn’t suggest expectations of a buyout are high,” Galliers said.

Even without Marchionne, FCA will remain “culturally more open to dealmaking and savvy to potential capital market opportunities than much of the competition,” he added.

“A lot of that’s now ingrained, so I don’t think you lose everything he’s brought to the company overnight.”

Yet, Manley will have a tough act to follow.

Marchionne resurrected one of Italy’s biggest corporate names and revitalized Chrysler, succeeding where the U.S. company’s two previous owners — Mercedes parent Daimler and private equity group Carberus — both failed.

He has multiplied Fiat’s value 11 times since taking charge, helped by moves such as the spinoffs of CNH Industrial and Ferrari. The planned separation of parts maker Magneti Marelli, due this year, should further increase that value-generation.

He also flattened an inflexible hierarchy, replacing layers of middle management with a meritocratic leadership style. He slashed costs by reducing the number of vehicle architectures and creating joint ventures to pool development and plant costs.
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Revelations that one of the most respected U.S. cardinals allegedly sexually abused both boys and adult seminarians have raised questions about who in the Catholic Church hierarchy knew — and what Pope Francis is going to do about it.

If the accusations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick bear out — including a new case reported Friday involving an 11-year-old boy — will Francis revoke his title as cardinal? Sanction him to a lifetime of penance and prayer? Or even defrock him, the expected sanction if McCarrick were a mere priest?

And will Francis, who has already denounced a “culture of cover-up” in the church, take the investigation all the way to the top, where it will inevitably lead? McCarrick’s alleged sexual misdeeds with adults were reportedly brought to the Vatican’s attention years ago.

The matter is now on the desk of the pope, who has already spent the better part of 2018 dealing with a spiraling child sex abuse, adult gay priest sex and cover-up scandal in Chile that was so vast the entire bishops’ conference offered to resign in May.

And on Friday, Francis accepted the resignation of the Honduran deputy to Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, who is one of Francis’ top advisers. Auxiliary Bishop Juan José Pineda Fasquelle, 57, was accused of sexual misconduct with seminarians and lavish spending on his lovers that was so obvious to Honduras’ poverty-wracked faithful that Maradiaga is now under pressure to reveal what he knew of Pineda’s misdeeds and why he tolerated a sexually active gay bishop in his ranks.

The McCarrick scandal poses the same questions. It was apparently an open secret in some U.S. church circles that “Uncle Ted” invited seminarians to his beach house, and into his bed.

While such an abuse of power may have been quietly tolerated for decades, it doesn’t fly in the #MeToo era. And there has been a deafening silence from McCarrick’s brother bishops about what they might have known and when.

Fraternal solidarity is common among clerics, but some observers point to it as possible evidence of the so-called “gay lobby” or “lavender mafia” at work. These euphemisms — frequently denounced as politically incorrect displays of homophobia in the church — are used by some to describe a perceived protection and promotion network of gay Catholic clergy.

“There is going to be so much clamor for the Holy Father to remove the red hat, to formally un-cardinalize him,” said the Rev. Thomas Berg, vice rector and director of admissions at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, the seminary of the archdiocese of New York.

Berg said the church needs to ensure that men with deep-seated same-sex attraction simply don’t enter seminaries — a position recently reinforced by the Vatican at large and by Francis in comments to Chilean and Italian bishops.

Berg said the church also needs to take action when celibacy vows are violated.

“We can’t effectively prevent the sexual abuse of minors or vulnerable adults by clergy while habitual and widespread failures in celibacy are quietly tolerated,” he said.

McCarrick, the 88-year-old retired archbishop of Washington and confidante to three popes, was ultimately undone when the U.S. church announced June 20 that Francis had ordered him removed from public ministry. The sanction was issued pending a full investigation into a “credible” allegation that he fondled a teenager more than 40 years ago in New York City.

The dioceses of Newark and Metuchen, New Jersey, simultaneously revealed that they had received three complaints of misconduct by McCarrick against adults and had settled two of them.

Another alleged victim, the son of a McCarrick family friend identified as James, came forward in a report in The New York Times and subsequently in an interview with The Associated Press. James said he was 11 when McCarrick first exposed himself to him. From there, McCarrick began a sexually abusive relationship that continued for another two decades, James told AP.

“I was the first guy he baptized,” James told AP. “I was his little boy. I was his special kid.”

McCarrick has denied the initial allegation of abuse against a minor and accepted the pope’s decision to remove him from public ministry.

Asked Friday about James, a spokeswoman said McCarrick hadn’t received formal notice of any new allegation but would follow the civil and church processes in place to investigate them.

Even now, Francis could take immediate action to remove McCarrick from the College of Cardinals, said Kurt Martens, a canon lawyer at the Catholic University of America.

He recalled the case of the late Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien, who recused himself from the 2013 conclave that elected Francis pope after unidentified priests alleged in newspapers that he engaged in sexual misconduct. In 2015, after a Vatican investigation, Francis accepted O’Brien’s resignation after he relinquished the rights and privileges of being a cardinal.

O’Brien was, however, allowed to retain the cardinal’s title and he died a member of the college.

“I think that is totally unsatisfactory,” Martens said, noting that just as the pope can grant the title of cardinal, he can also take it away. “O’Brien resigned, the pope accepted it. Isn’t that the world upside down that someone picks his own penalty?”

O’Brien was never accused of sexually abusing a minor, however, as McCarrick now stands.

The stiffest punishment that an ordinary priest would face if such an accusation is proven would be dismissal from the clerical state, or laicization.

The Vatican rarely if ever, however, imposes such a penalty on elderly prelates. It also is loath to do so for bishops, because theologically speaking, defrocked bishops can still validly ordain priests and bishops.

Not even the serial rapist Rev. Marcial Maciel was defrocked after the Vatican finally convicted him of abusing Legion of Christ seminarians. Maciel was sentenced to a lifetime of penance and prayer — the likely canonical sanction for McCarrick if he is found guilty of abusing a minor in a church trial.
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For the past several months, intelligence and security officials in the U.S. government and private sector have cautiously marveled at the seemingly slow pace of Russian cyberattacks and influence operations using social media.

Unlike in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, officials say so far there has been no frenzy of hacks, phishing attacks or use of ads and false news stories to penetrate voting systems, alter voter rolls or influence voters ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.

Some have suggested the slowdown is the result of better preparation and better cyber tools that have allowed social media companies to thwart Russian efforts. But among Western intelligence agencies, there is also concern that Russia may not be relying on bots and trolls because they have real people who can do the work instead.

“We [Estonian intelligence] have detected a network of politicians, journalists, diplomats, business people who are actually Russian influence agents and who are doing what they are told to do,” Mikk Marran, the director general of Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service said Friday, speaking of Moscow’s efforts in the West.

“We see clearly that those people are pushing Russia’s agenda,” Marran told an audience at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado.

Marran’s comments come during a week that saw U.S. President Donald Trump casting doubt on the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, while standing alongside his Russian counterpart, President Vladimir Putin, following their meeting in Helsinki. 

Since returning from Europe, Trump has backtracked on his initial statement, reading a prepared statement during Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting and in an interview Wednesday with CBS News.

Still, senior U.S. intelligence and security officials remain concerned, publicly asserting Russia did indeed meddle with the 2016 election. 

A U.S. special counsel, Robert Mueller, appointed to investigate Russian involvement in the 2016 election and possible collusion by members of the Trump campaign, on July 13 indicted 12 Russian intelligence officials for hacking the computer networks belonging to the Democratic party, and has previously secured indictments against Trump campaign staffers, including campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Yet despite the publicity from the U.S. investigation and greater awareness across the West of Russia’s influence operations, Estonian intelligence officials assert Moscow has not been deterred. Instead they say the Kremlin has ratcheted up efforts to make use of “influence agents,” many of whom Moscow has been cultivating for years.

“Politicians that have been in the margins of local politics some years ago are actually right now in national parliaments or national governments,” Marran said. “They have made some bad investments but they have also made some very good investments.”

“What they [the Russians] have provided to those people is media support, political support. They have proposed or provided some exclusive business opportunities,” he added. “In some occasions we have also seen that they have provided financial aid.”

Marran declined to name any politicians, diplomats or journalists suspected of being in Moscow’s pocket. And while it is not the first time that Estonia, a U.S. ally and a NATO member, has warned of Russia’s cultivation of “influence agents” in Western Europe, there are growing concerns that such operations have taken hold in the United States.

Former U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggested Thursday that Russian efforts may even have reached into the White House.

“I’ve been trying my best to give the president the benefit of the doubt and always expressed potential other theories as to why he behaves as he does with respect to Russia generally and Putin specifically,” Clapper told CNN when asked about Trump’s refusal to back the findings of the U.S. intelligence community during his joint news conference with Putin Monday in Helsinki.

“But more and more I come to a conclusion after the Helsinki performance and since, that I really do wonder if the Russians have something on him,” Clapper said.

There have also been persistent rumors that some members of Congress could also be doing Russia’s bidding  a notion reinforced Thursday by Bill Browder, the chief executive officer of Hermitage Capital and a driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, which allows Washington to withhold visas and freeze financial assets of Russian officials thought to be corrupt or human rights abusers.

“There’s one member of the U.S. Congress who I believe is on the payroll of Russia — it’s a Republican Congressmen from Orange County [California] named Dana Rohrabacher who is running around trying to overturn the Magnitsky Act,” Browder said at the Aspen Security Forum.

“I don’t have the bank transfers to prove it, but I believe that that’s the case,” Browder said when he was pressed on the accusation, citing Rohrabacher’s behavior.

VOA contacted Rohrabacher’s office regarding the accusation, but has not yet gotten any response.

U.S. intelligence and security agencies also declined comment on the allegations that Russian influence agents have infiltrated the U.S. government, though The New York Times reported in May that intelligence agents had warned Rohrabacher, long been considered to be one of the most Russia-friendly members of Congress, as far back as 2012 that Kremlin agents were actively trying to recruit him.

And during a private meeting in June 2016, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told fellow Republican lawmakers, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post.

“It was a bad joke,” McCarthy told reporters after the tape emerged. “That was all there was to it. Nobody believes it.”

Katherine Gypson contributed to this report.
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The sudden thaw between longtime enemies Eritrea and Ethiopia is opening up a world of possibilities for the neighboring countries’ residents: new economic and diplomatic ties, telephone and transport links and the end to one of Africa’s most bitter feuds.

But the fledgling peace is raising new questions for Eritrea’s diaspora, tens of thousands who fled their government’s tight grip, rigid system of compulsory military conscription and endemic poverty.

Now they are cautiously waiting to see how the truce will shape their homeland and perhaps offer them a chance to return.

“I want to go to my country,” said Salamwit Willedo, a 29-year-old Eritrean living in Israel. “Everywhere I am a refugee. But my country is my homeland. I feel home there. So I hope, I wish, that (peace) will happen.”

​Suddenly, peace

Tiny Eritrea, with 5 million people, gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after years of rebel warfare. It has been ruled by President Isaias Afwerki since then and has become one of the world’s most reclusive nations. The state of war with Ethiopia has kept the Red Sea country in a constant state of military readiness, with a harsh, indefinite conscription system that has drawn criticism from rights groups and sent thousands fleeing to Europe, Israel and other African nations.

The Horn of Africa arch-foes fought a bloody border war from 1998 to 2000 that killed tens of thousands and left families separated. But the antagonism faded abruptly last month when reformist Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced that Ethiopia was fully accepting a peace deal signed in 2000 that hands key disputed border areas to Eritrea.

The hostility between the nations has evaporated dramatically since. The leaders have visited each other’s countries to jubilant receptions, diplomatic and other ties have been restored, and the flagship Ethiopian Airlines resumed flights to Eritrea this week.

Ethiopia’s embrace of the peace deal was the boldest change yet by Abiy as the country moves away from years of anti-government protests demanding wider freedoms in Africa’s second-most populous nation of more than 100 million people. Now eyes are turned to Eritrea and how peace might prompt it to loosen up and drop its long defensive stance.

Diaspora’s divided opinions

“Hate, discrimination and conspiracy is now over,” the 72-year-old Eritrean leader said this week to cheers and people chanting his name during his first visit to Ethiopia in 22 years.

While the diaspora is split into government supporters and critics, many Eritreans abroad are skeptical of change so long as the current government remains in power.

“I think it’s not going to bring a solution inside the country, because we still have thousands of prisoners in the country, we don’t have a constitution, we don’t have internal peace,” said Bluts Iyassu, who came to Tel Aviv in 2010 and is a member of United Eritreans for Justice, a group of Eritrean expatriates who are working to promote democracy in their home country.

Israel has become a prime destination for fleeing Eritreans and is home to about 26,000. Most live in downtrodden neighborhoods in south Tel Aviv and work in menial jobs in restaurants or hotels.

While many say their lives are better than in Eritrea, they have not received a warm welcome in Israel, which has struggled to cope with an influx of migrants from Eritrea and Sudan.

Israel sees the migrants as job-seekers who threaten the Jewish character of the state. It has detained migrants and sent them to third countries in a bid to lessen their numbers.

Rights groups say that Israel may use the reconciliation between Eritrea and Ethiopia as an excuse to encourage the migrants to leave.

Gamut of emotions

For the roughly 170,000 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers living in Ethiopia, the peace in the short term means a newfound ability to communicate by telephone with their loved ones back home.

“I can’t put my joy into words. I have already talked to my sisters in (the port city of) Massawa since the phone line was restored,” said Alemnesh Woldegiorgis, 64, an Eritrean living in Ethiopia. He said he hopes to be issued a passport to visit family he hadn’t seen for 20 years.

In Germany, where nearly 70,000 Eritreans have settled, most are refugees who came to the country over the past five years, according to Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees.

Hintsa Amine lives with other Eritreans in temporary migrant housing near Berlin’s former airport. The 22-year-old arrived in Germany a year and a half ago, and while he supports the peace deal, he said it hasn’t changed his plans because he still doesn’t feel safe in his home country.

“I want to stay here in Germany,” he said.

For Mohammed Lumumba Ibrahim, 61, who has been living in Germany for 45 years, the truce has sparked hope that he might take his children to see his homeland.

“I would love to go with the whole family. But I need to make sure myself that we have peace, that there is no war so that I can take my children and show them their fatherland,” he said.

​Defending the government

Some diaspora members defended Eritrea’s government, saying it wasn’t to blame for all the country’s ills.

Essey Asbu, 47, who came to the United States in the 1980s as a refugee, returned to Eritrea for the 10th anniversary of independence and again about two years ago for the 25th anniversary. Eritreans mark their independence from 1991, when they captured their future capital, Asmara.

He said he doesn’t believe the current regime would have a problem letting any members of the diaspora return, unless they have committed a crime.

“I don’t know why anybody would not be very comfortable to return,” he said, adding that Eritreans who are professionals or have been educated in other countries could be the country’s greatest resource if they return.

According to the most recent data from the U.S. Census American Community Survey, there are roughly 34,000 people born in Eritrea now living in the U.S. California has the largest number, about 6,200. About 1,150 live in Minnesota, according to the survey.

Mohamed Salih Idris, 49, of Minneapolis, left in the 1970s and came to the U.S. in 1999. Idris has not tried to return to Eritrea, citing danger for himself and his family and the threat of not being allowed to leave.

He said the peace agreement is bringing some optimism, but that feeling is laced with mistrust.

“There is no trust in the current regime at all. The hope is that now with this peace agreement, there is no excuse for them to continue doing what they have been doing,” he said.

He said fear of imprisonment is very real. 

“That fear is making it very difficult for anyone to think about going back right now,” he said.
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