Turkish authorities have arrested a mayor from Turkey’s main opposition party over his alleged links to a U.S.-based Muslim cleric, the state-run news agency reported Tuesday. Separately, c lose to 200 people were detained in other police operations.Anadolu Agency said Burak Oguz, the mayor of the Aegean coastal town of Urla, was arrested late Monday for alleged ties to Fethullah Gulen’s network. Gulen is blamed by Ankara for a failed coup attempt in 2016.Oguz, who was elected in local elections in March, is the first mayor from the main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, to be arrested on terror charges. At least 14 elected mayors belonging to Turkey’s pro-Kurdish party have previously been detained for alleged ties to outlawed Kurdish rebels. The party denies terror charges and says the arrests are politically motivated aimed at weakening its hold in Turkey’s southeast.The CHP condemned Oguz’s arrest and denied the accusation of links to Gulen, saying the network had no “chance of serving within the CHP.””We condemn the use of the justice [system] to remove those who were elected,” said CHP provincial head, Deniz Yucel.FILE – Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in the United States since 1999, denies involvement in the coup attempt.Separately, authorities detained 171 people on suspicion of links to Gulen’s network in simultaneous raids in the capital, Ankara, Anadolu reported. Those detained are suspected of using a messaging app that Turkey says was used by coup plotters to communicate with each other. Meanwhile, prosecutors issued detention warrants for 18 Health Ministry personnel, including 10 doctors, the agency reported. At least 10 of the suspects were detained Tuesday.On July 15, 2016, a group of officers attempted a coup to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Some 250 people were killed and more than 2,000 were injured during the failed attempt.Some 77,000 people have been arrested and around 130,000 others, including military personnel, have been dismissed from state jobs in an ongoing government crackdown on Gulen’s network since the coup.Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in the United States since 1999, denies involvement in the coup attempt. 
       AP-WF-12-17-19 1238GMT 
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Spanish police retrieved a body from a boat off the southern coast on Tuesday, the eighth migrant killed at sea in a 24-hour period while trying to reach the country.The boat was spotted in the western Mediterranean off the coast of the southern region of Andalusia before dawn and 47 survivors — 30 men and 17 men — were taken to the port of Motril, a spokesman for Spain’s Guardia Civil police force said.A Moroccan coastguard vessel had earlier retrieved seven bodies and rescued 70 migrants after they got into difficulty in the Alboran Sea in the western Mediterranean, a Moroccan military source said.The survivors, including 10 women and a baby, were found in a “very poor state” and were taken for medical treatment in Nador in northern Morocco, the source added.The boat capsized carrying around 100 migrants headed towards Spain, according to Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras, which added that 24 people were still missing. Over 98,000 people have reached Europe by sea this year, including around 25,000 who arrived in Spain, according to the International Organization for Migration.More than 1,200 migrants have died or are missing at sea after attempting to cross the Mediterranean this year, UN figures show.
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A three-day summit on tackling the world’s refugee crisis got under way Monday in Geneva, Switzerland. Thousands of delegates — including around 100 government ministers — are attending the United Nations’ Global Refugee Forum to discuss how to help the tens of millions of people who have been forced to flee their homes, many through conflict. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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They keep on coming — fleeing the killing fields of war-torn countries in the Middle East and Africa, escaping the random violence of vicious drug gangs in Central America, and running from repressive regimes in Asia.A world in crisis means more refugees, and the trend lines are not promising.There are now more than 70 million refugees and displaced people around the world — nearly 26 million outside the borders of their own countries, according to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.Speaking ahead of the UNHCR’s first Global Refugee Forum, which formally started Monday in Geneva, U.N. officials say they expect those numbers will climb when they have concluded the final troubling tally for 2019.FILE – Filippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, speaks during a news conference in Bogota, Colombia, Oct. 6, 2018.Opening the forum, Filippo Grandi, UNHCR’s top official, said the three-day meeting needs to see “very concrete commitments” made by governments, businesses and relief organizations.”The purpose of this meeting, this conference, is not just to talk but to rally international support for countries hosting refugees in a spirit and with the objective of sharing the burden more equitably,” Grandi said.Organized in cooperation with Switzerland, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Germany, Pakistan and Turkey, the forum’s goal is to strengthen international support for refugees by dividing up responsibility between nations to ease pressures on so-called “front-line countries” — those who are receiving the greatest numbers of refugees — and to outline clear markers for what should be expected in terms of improving access to education and jobs, and providing protection for the displaced until they can return safely to their homes.’Solutions and opportunities’The organizers have promised bold new measures, including ways of enhancing refugee self-reliance and a sense of inclusion. The UNCHR hopes additional countries and other international agencies and charities, as well as faith organizations and private sector businesses, will declare their commitment to improve the plight of refugees. And U.N. officials hope to start engineering legal and diplomatic adjustments that will help refugees integrate better in their temporary homes.The forum comes a year after the U.N. General Assembly agreed that governments need to establish a more predictable and equitable approach to the treatment of refugees. Some hope the Geneva gathering will later be seen as an inflection point, thanks to the pooling together of ideas by heads of state, government ministers, business leaders, humanitarians and refugees themselves.FILE – Kelly Clements, UNHCR Deputy High Commissioner, speaks during a session at the World Economic Forum on the Middle East and North Africa at the King Hussein Convention Center at the Dead Sea, May 20, 2017.”We are at the end of a decade that has been more than tumultuous in terms of levels of displacement,” U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees Kelly Clements told AFP in an interview. “We see the need for states, for international organizations, for the private sector (to help explore) how the international community can better help to respond.”On Monday, representatives from Zambia showcased some of their innovative approaches to help refugees find work or resume their education by having their previous education attainment and qualifications recognized. UNESCO is drawing on the Zambian experience to develop an international qualifications passport.”This will help people who possess the knowledge but don’t possess the papers,” said Muhammed, a Syrian refugee living in Germany who spoke Monday at the forum. “There is a lot of potential amongst refugees that is being unused. There are brilliant minds available that these passports can unlock.”Similar pilot projects to Zambia’s are set to be rolled out in 2020 in Iraq and Colombia.Also at the forum on Monday, which attracted around 3,000 participants, seven African countries showcased their regional and coordinated efforts to find long-term solutions to ease the plight of refugees in the Horn of Africa.”It may be a region of great displacement, but (it) has also become a region of solutions and opportunities,” Grandi said.Detention campsBut following a decade in which the number of refugees and the displaced have reached unprecedented proportions, overcoming donor fatigue could be difficult. Pledges may well be made, but the money and aid may not necessarily be forthcoming, warn some analysts.A bigger challenge will come with the idea of greater burden-sharing between countries. The forum coincides with another flare-up between European Union countries over the sharing of responsibility for the continent’s refugee influx, with Greece announcing controversial plans to build closed detention camps for migrants and refugees to cope with a new surge of asylum-seekers.FILE – Refugees and migrants arrive at the port of Thessaloniki, northern Greece, Sept. 2, 2019.Humanitarian organizations have denounced the planned camps as “prisons,” saying they go in the opposite direction from the Geneva forum with its emphasis on fostering inclusion for asylum-seekers.”I made it clear to the (Greek) government that UNHCR policy is against detaining asylum-seekers … seeking asylum is not a crime,” Grandi told Greek officials during a visit to Athens last month.Since coming into office in July, Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has mounted a series of appeals to EU member states to demonstrate greater solidarity with the front-line states of southern Europe.Most disturbing for Athens is that the latest surge is not slowing, despite stormy winter weather. Rickety boats laden with refugees seeking safety or a better economic life are continuing to land on Greek shores.In September, 10,551 newcomers arrived in Greece, the highest in a single month since the EU struck a deal with Turkey to curb migrant flows at the height of Syria’s civil war in 2016.Now, Greece’s center-right government, which was elected on a tough law-and-order platform, is under domestic pressure to make good on its electoral promise to pursue a deterrence and deportation approach toward asylum-seekers.Last week, Mitsotakis told top EU officials that his country had “reached its limits.””This is not a Greek-Turkish problem,” he told officials during a visit to Athens. “It’s an issue that affects the European Union as a whole, and we are looking forward to your help, as well as a firm European policy, to address it.”Burden-sharingEU countries have struggled for years to agree to a firm policy on burden-sharing, with stiff resistance to every plan coming from the Visegrád countries of Central Europe, led by Hungary.The countries have adamantly declined to take in asylum-seekers who landed in Italy, Greece or Spain. Part of the issue is a continuing dispute about who should be considered a refugee, and who should be counted as an economic migrant.FILE – Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban talks to the media in Budapest, Hungary, Oct. 13, 2019.Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban argues that by welcoming asylum-seekers, Europe acts as a magnet for them, and the continent risks being swamped and its security compromised.  Orban and other opponents of burden-sharing also maintain that previous international treaties stipulate that war refugees should seek sanctuary in the first safe third country they reach, and that the responsibility lies with front-line states.Forum organizers are determined to keep major policy differences in the background in Geneva. That may be difficult, especially with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan acting as one of the co-hosts of the forum.Turkey hosts more than 3 million Syrian refugees, and Erdogan has been accused of “weaponizing” refugees for political and economic purposes with his plans to resettle them in Kurdish areas of northern Syria.Speaking before his arrival in Geneva, a combative Erdogan warned that Turkey “can no longer carry this burden alone.”He complained that Turkey had only received half of the $6 billion in aid the EU promised in 2016 for Turkish efforts to stanch the influx of Mideast refugees into Europe.”Whenever we meet, they say that it is about to come. But nothing has come yet,” Erdogan said.
 
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Russian President Vladimir Putin on December 16 signed amendments to the Administrative Violations Code that allow hefty fines for violating the controversial law on “foreign agents,” which critics say is used to muzzle dissent and discourage the free exchange of ideas and a free press.According to the changes, individuals who violate the law more than twice in a 12-month period will have to pay a fine of up to 10,000 rubles ($159) for the first violation, and up to 100,000 rubles ($1,590) or 15 days in jail for repeat violations.Organizations will be obliged to pay a penalty of up to 1 million rubles ($15,900) for the first violation, and up to 5 million rubles ($79,500) for subsequent violations of the law.The amendments were approved by lawmakers earlier this month.Two weeks earlier, Putin signed into law a bill that gives authorities the power to label reporters who work for organizations officially listed as foreign agents as foreign agents themselves.The tag will be applied to individuals who collaborate with foreign media outlets and receive financial or other material support from them.Russia passed the original foreign agent law — which requires all NGOs receiving foreign funding to register — in 2012 following a major wave of anti-government protests. Putin blamed Western influence and money for those protests.Critics of the law say it stigmatizes organizations with the designation and would do the same to journalists if they are labeled as foreign agents.RFE/RL President Jamie Fly said on December 4 that the law ratchets up pressure on hundreds of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) correspondents in Russia who provide one of the few remaining alternatives to Kremlin-controlled news.Last month, Russia’s Justice Ministry listed RFE/RL’s Sever.Realii website as a “foreign agent,” saying the decision was based on conclusions made by the parliamentary committee on an investigation into meddling in the country’s internal affairs.In December 2017, the Justice Ministry listed Current Time TV, several RFE/RL services and projects, such as its Russian Service, Tatar-Bashkir Service, Sibir.Realii, Idel.Realii, Factograph, Kavkaz Realii, and Krym.Realii, as well as the Voice of America, as “foreign mass media performing the functions of a foreign agent.”Russian officials have said the law is a “symmetrical response” after Russia’s state-funded channel RT — which U.S. authorities accuse of spreading propaganda — was required to register its U.S. operating unit under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).U.S. officials have said the action is not symmetrical, arguing that the U.S. and Russian laws differ and that Russia uses its “foreign agent” legislation to silence dissent and discourage the free exchange of ideas.Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based rights group, in 2017 called the law “devastating” for local NGOs, saying more than a dozen had been forced to close their doors.With reporting by TASS and Meduza.
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Sharing the cockpit of a helicopter on sizzling tarmac, French and British air force chiefs vowed to pursue the joint fight against jihadists in the heart of the Sahel even as the shadow of Brexit looms over their countries.”We’ve got a long, fabulous history of working alongside each other, and I don’t expect anything to change anytime soon,” Royal Air Force (RAF) Chief of Air Staff Mike Wigston told AFP on a visit to the city of Gao with French counterpart Philippe Lavigne.”If anything, we are going to work stronger together,” he said.Backed by 100 British personnel, France has a 4,500-strong Sahel force supporting national armies struggling with a seven-year-old jihadist revolt.Thousands of civilians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes.The two generals this weekend visited Mali, Niger and Chad, which with Burkina Faso and Mauritania form the so-called G5 Sahel, an anti-terror force.Wigston said Mali and its neighbors were “the front line of instability.”The priority of the Sahel deployment “is to stamp out the violent extremism which is making people’s lives a misery,” he said.”But there is a wider security issue here which affects Europe and the potential for this instability and the conflict in this region to spill into Europe… so we are also here to protect Europe.”What next?Britain is set to leave the European Union by January 31 following a general election that gave the pro-Brexit Conservative party a large majority.France sent troops into Mali in 2013 to help drive back Islamist insurgents who had seized the north of the country.But attacks have continued since then, and the conflict has since spread to the country’s center as well as to neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger.France’s Operation Barkhane remains in place to train and support poorly equipped local forces, but at a hefty cost that France’s EU allies have only partially eased.Britain and France signed a defense cooperation pact in London in 2010 — and both sides have repeatedly said it will not be affected by Brexit.FILE – A Royal Air Force Chinook flies over London during the Service of Commemoration – Afghanistan, at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, March 13, 2015.Since July 2018, London has contributed three heavy-lift Chinook helicopters to France’s Sahel fight. They have clocked up some 1,600 hours of flying time to date, transporting about 11,000 personnel and 800 tonnes of freight.The twin-rotor helicopters can haul nearly four tonnes of supplies and more than 30 troops at a time — a vital contribution in a region where road access to frontline troops is long and dangerous, with a high risk of mines and militia attacks.The helicopter support “allows us to devote ourselves to air combat missions while our British comrades provide logistics, refuelling and troop transport,” said Loic, who heads France’s Barkhane air combat group in Mali.In line with French military security protocol, the colonel can be identified only by his first name.Without the British help, he said, “we would be forced to assign other helicopters or resort to slower, riskier, road convoys.”‘With or without Brexit’Fighters on the ground say the Chinooks have been invaluable.French President Emmanuel Macron pays his respect in front of the flag-draped coffins of the thirteen French soldiers killed in Mali, during a ceremony at the Hotel National des Invalides in Paris, Dec. 2, 2019.They were deployed to help out last month when two French army helicopters crashed in Mali, killing all 13 on board and bringing to 41 the number of French troops killed in the Sahel region since 2013.”For us, it would be a real plus if this [Chinook] capacity remained beyond the summer of 2020,” the current deadline for the British deployment, Colonel Loic said.For his part, Wigston said: “I absolutely understand how vital this asset is to Barkhane, I will transmit (the message) to the political authorities in London.”Aside from Barkhane, London has announced the deployment of 250 troops to the Sahel for three years from 2020 as part of the United Nations’ MINUSMA peacekeeping force in Mali.Lavigne insisted that broader military cooperation would continue “with or without Brexit”.”Our air forces are quite similar, they have the same operating capacities and expertise, and tomorrow we will continue to work together to bring security,” he said.       
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Turkey has dispatched a surveillance and reconnaissance drone to the breakaway north of ethnically divided island nation of Cyprus amid tensions over offshore oil and gas exploration, Turkey’s state-run media said Monday.The Anadolu news agency said the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drone took off from an airbase in Dalaman, Turkey, and touched down Monday at the airport in Gecitkale — known as Lefkoniko in Greek, on Cyprus.Kudret Ozersay, foreign minister of the self-declared Turkish Cypriot state, told reporters Sunday that the Turkish deployment would be limited to unarmed drones as there was “no need” for armed ones.Earlier, Turkish Cypriot Prime Minister Ersin Tatar said there was an “urgent need” to address the security concerns of Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots in the eastern Mediterranean.It’s unclear what the drones will be specifically tasked to do.Cyprus Defense Minister Savvas Angelides called the move an “additional factor contributing to instability” in the region, hurting efforts aimed at reunifying the country.Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said last week that Ankara could use its military forces to halt gas drilling in waters off Cyprus that it claims as its own.Cavusoglu said Turkey “has the right to prevent” any unauthorized drilling in waters that it says fall within its own continental shelf.Turkey doesn’t recognize Cyprus as a state and asserts that 44% of the island nation’s exclusive economic zone are its own.Part of the area that Turkey claims it has rights to are waters where Cyprus has exclusive economic rights and where companies including ExxonMobil, France’s Total and Italy’s Eni are licensed by the Cypriot government to jointly carry out drilling.Cyprus’ government spokesman Kyriakos Koushios told state broadcaster CyBC on Sunday that Turkish warships told an Israeli research vessel to leave “disputed” waters off Cyprus last month.Cyprus was split in 1974 when Turkey invaded following a coup by supporters of union with Greece. Only Turkey recognizes a Turkish Cypriot declaration of independence in the north, where it keeps more than 35,000 troops.Earlier this year, Turkey dispatched warship-escorted drill ships to conduct exploratory gas drilling inside Cyprus’ economic zone, including in an area where Eni and Total are licensed to drill. Ankara said it’s acting to protect its interests and those of Turkish Cypriots to the area’s energy reserves.Last year, Turkish warships physically blocked a drill ship that was scheduled to carry out exploratory drilling on behalf of Eni in waters southeast of Cyprus.The European Union has leveled sanctions against Turkey over its drilling activities off EU member Cyprus.Last week, EU leaders rejected a deal that Turkey signed with Libya’s U.N.-recognized government that delineates the two countries’ maritime borders. Ankara says the deal gives it exclusive rights to a large swath of the eastern Mediterranean. 
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A U.N. tribunal will hear arguments in March in the appeal of former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic, convicted of genocide and war crimes committed in Bosnia’s 1990s civil war.Mladic, once dubbed the Butcher of Bosnia, was sentenced to life behind bars in November 2017 for his role in the Balkans war, including the 1995 Srebrenica massacre — Europe’s worst bloodshed since World War II.About 100,000 people were killed and 2.2 million others displaced in the 1992-95 war, which erupted as communal rivalries tore Yugoslavia apart after the fall of communism.Both prosecution and defense have appealed against the verdict, which found 77-year-old Mladic guilty on 10 counts including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder and deportation.Judges at the U.N.’s International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague ordered that the hearings would take place on March 17-18.In one of its final judgments, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) acquitted the brazen ex-commander of genocide in certain municipalities, a fact which now forms the bulk of the prosecution’s appeal.Judges had said “ruthless” Bosnian Serb forces under Mladic’s command carried out “mass executions” and showed “little or no respect for human life or dignity”.The crimes were “amongst the most heinous known to humankind”, the judge said when handing down the sentence.At Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb forces overran UN peacekeepers before slaughtering almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys and dumping their bodies into mass graves.Mladic was among the top leaders to face international justice over the Balkans wars — along with former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and ex-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.They were accused of forming a “joint criminal enterprise” to create a Greater Serbia by ridding the territory of Bosnian Muslims and non-Serbs.Milosevic died in his cell in The Hague in March 2006, suffering a heart attack before his trial had finished.Karadzic was convicted of genocide in 2016 for the Srebrenica massacre and other atrocities during the war and sentenced to 40 years.After an appeal, judges increased his sentence to life, saying the initial term had underestimated the “sheer scale and systematic cruelty” of his crimes. 
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Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday threatened to close two strategic military bases used by the United States in Turkey, after Washington warned of sanctions over Ankara buying Russian arms.”If necessary, we can close Incirlik and we can close Kurecik,” Erdogan on the pro-government A Haber television channel. The two bases sit on Turkey’s southwest coast, near the border with Syria.Erdogan has regularly raised this possibility in the past, at times of tension between the two countries.The U.S. Air Force uses the airbase at Incirlik for raids on positions held by the  so-called Islamic State group in Syria. The Kurecik base houses a major NATO radar station.FILE – U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II fighter jets (foreground) are pictured at Incirlik Air Base, near Adana, Turkey, Dec. 11, 2015.Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu raised the issue of the bases last week. Responding to the U.S. threat of fresh sanctions, he warned that their closure could be “put on the table”.Turkey faces U.S. sanctions over its decision to buy the Russian S-400 missile defense system, despite warnings from Washington.And on Friday, Turkey summoned the U.S. ambassador after the U.S. Senate followed the lower house and voted to recognize the 1915 killings of Armenians as genocide. The bill has yet to be signed by President Donald Trump.Armenia claims 1.5 million died in the killings. Turkey says the number of deaths was far lower and Turks also died, blaming the killings on the World War I.
 
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Chinese state television pulled the scheduled live broadcast of a football (soccer) game following one of the players’ comments online criticizing the government’s treatment of its Muslim Uighur minority.China’s CCTV was scheduled to broadcast the football game between Arsenal and Manchester United, but instead decided to show a taped game between Tottenham Hotspur and the Wolverhampton Wanderers.Arsenal footballer Mesut Ozil posted on Twitter Friday comments condemning China’s crackdown on Muslim minorities in the Western region, while also criticizing other Muslim countries for not speaking up against abuses.”Korans are being burnt… Mosques are being shut down… Muslim schools are being banned… Religious scholars are being killed one by one… Brothers are forcefully being sent to camps,” Ozil wrote in Turkish on his Twitter account Friday.#HayırlıCumalarDoğuTürkistan ?? pic.twitter.com/dJgeK4KSIk— Mesut Özil (@MesutOzil1088) December 13, 2019The U.S., the United Nations and various human rights groups have accused China of detaining an estimated one million ethnic Muslims in so-called “re-education camps” in the remote Western province of Xinjiang in an attempt to force them to renounce their religion and heritage.Chia’s state-run Global Times said on its Twitter account Sunday that CCTV made the decision to pull the game after Ozil’s comments had “disappointed fans and football governing authorities”.Arsenal posted on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, that the the content Ozil shared was “entirely Ozil’s personal opinion”. The team has not posted a response on Twitter or released and official statement.  
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Hours before the official result was complete for Britain’s general election, U.S. Democrats on the other side of the Atlantic were taking to social-media sites to draw quick conclusions on what Labour’s catastrophic defeat might mean for them and the electoral challenge they face with the 2020 White House contest.Forewarned by an exit poll, which suggested Britain’s storied Labour Party was heading for its worst election rebuff since 1935, one of the first Democrats to hit the send button was Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security advisor to Barack Obama.He tweeted: “There are a lot of factors that went into this massive defeat, but progressives have to learn from them to do better on both sides of the Atlantic.”But that begs the crucial question: what lessons?Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is seen near his home in London, Britain, December 14, 2019. REUTERS/Toby MelvilleOn the British side of the Atlantic, Labour politicians can’t agree about what went wrong for them in what’s likely to be seen as the most consequential British election for a quarter-of-a-century, with some, including defeated party leader Jeremy Corbyn, insisting that the radical socialist policies he advocated, including the nationalization of a swathe of the British economy, were individually popular and that the blame should go on Brexit.A key Corbyn ally, Len McCluskey, the leader of the powerful Unite trade union, said the policies in the party’s manifesto were “very popular,” but “we very evidently didn’t win the argument over Brexit” and the party’s policy of holding a second referendum on European Union membership. McCluskey said the party’s “biggest mistake” was “perhaps underestimating the desire for people who had voted Leave to leave the European Union.”But many Labour moderates believe Brexit-favoring working-class voters who deserted the party in droves would have overlooked the issue of Europe, if Labour had had a more popular and centrist leader and a manifesto shorn of leftwing dogma. In a post-election opinion poll, only 17 percent of Labour defectors cited Brexit as the reason for their switch to the Conservatives.”Jeremy Corbyn was destined to lead the Labour Party to a catastrophic defeat,” according to Jason Cowley, the editor of the New Statesman magazine, Britain’s leading leftwing weekly. “If he believed that the British would vote for the most radical socialist manifesto in our history, he was sadly deluded. The party has learned nothing from past defeats: the more it moves to the left, the more people are alienated,” he added in a post-mortem assessment for Britain’s The Times newspaper.Cowley says Labour has lost touch with Britain’s working-class and the party’s defeat Thursday is a parable of what can go wrong when a party rejects pragmatism for “ideological purity.”Some Democrats in the U.S.  worry that might be the case with their own party and say the British election should be seen as window on the 2020 presidential race.Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a campaign event in Nashua, N.H., Dec. 8, 2019.Former U.S. vice president Joe Biden, the current front-runner to win the Democratic nomination to take on Trump, has said that the British election should be taken as a warning against Democrats moving too far to the radical left ahead of the 2020 White House race.Speaking to supporters in San Francisco, Biden argued that the radicalism of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn ultimately contributed to Boris Johnson’s landslide victory last week.Others on the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, too, fear that Labour’s defeat may foreshadow trouble for their bid to vanquish Trump, especially if the Democrats pick a progressive nominee like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren as their champion in the 2020 presidential election.Political trends on one side of the Atlantic have often presaged trends on the other, although often with time lags because of misaligned elections. Both countries were moderately conservative in the 1950s and Republican and Conservative governments accepted the welfare systems established by their predecessors in office and ideological rivals, Franklin Roosevelt and Britain’s Clement Attlee.In the 1960s both countries trended left, although were divided over the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, free-market conservatives — Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan — reshaped their nations’ politics.FILE – Tony Blair and Bill Clinton hold hands during an event to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, April 10, 2018.And in the 1990s “Third Way” Democrats, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, marched almost in lockstep to refashion their parties as market-friendly, seeking to blend center-right economics with center-left social policies. The 2016 Brexit referendum was seen by many, including Donald Trump’s then strategist Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s chief of staff, as foreshadowing Trump’s upset a few months later of Hillary Clinton, who saw her candidacy rebuffed in the fading towns of the “rust belt” states much like Corbyn was rejected in the post-industrial north of England.Nationalist conservatives rule the roost now in Washington and London, prioritizing the nation state over multilateralism and favoring tough immigration restrictions. The skirmishing by Democrats over the British election result is enmeshing with the fight over who should get the party’s presidential nomination.Democrats favoring a progressive candidate maintain there are no real lessons to draw from Johnson’s election win, echoing Corbyn supporters on the other side of the Atlantic by arguing Labour lost the election because of Brexit. “This UK election was ultimately an election about Brexit, and Brexit won. There’s no clean analogue to that in the U.S,” says Kate Aronoff, a senior fellow at Data for Progress, a progressive U.S. think tank.”The UK election was undeniably bad for Labour, but it doesn’t at all vindicate centrists saying the U.S. should make one of them the Democratic nominee. Left policies are popular,” she tweeted.Aronoff, like other U.S. progressives maintain that the kind of centrist politics espoused by establishment Democrats also got rebuffed by British voters in an election that dashed the hopes of Britain’s centrist Liberal Democrats, who presented themselves as a respectable alternative between the Conservatives and Labour. Their leader Jo Swinson even failed to get reelected as a lawmaker.People stand behind a banner supporting the results of the general election, in London, Britain, Dec. 13, 2019.Some commentators who’ve chronicled the rise of populist nationalism say neither moderates nor progressives have the grasped the full scale of the realignment of Western politics that’s underway. The UK vote wasn’t just any election, says Matthew Goodwin, an academic at Britain’s Kent University and co-author of the book “National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy.” “The old left versus right economic divide continues to make way for a new cultural divide.”He says Brexit was just one factor prompting working-class voters to trade left for right, with other driving issues coming down to promises of immigration reform and prioritizing national independence. Conservative nationalists have hit on a winning formula by leaning left on economics, with promises of increased government spending, and right on culture when it comes to identity politics and pledges to get tough on crime.Goodwin believes it is easier for the right to move left on economics than it is for the left to move right on questions of national identity which are worrying socially conservative working-class voters.  
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Climate activist Greta Thunberg and Germany’s national railway company created a tweetstorm Sunday after she posted a photo of herself sitting on the floor of a train surrounded by lots of bags.The image has drawn plenty of comment online about the performance of German railways.Thunberg posted the tweet late Saturday with the comment “traveling on overcrowded trains through Germany. And I’m finally on my way home!”Traveling on overcrowded trains through Germany. And I’m finally on my way home! pic.twitter.com/ssfLCPsR8o
— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 14, 2019But German railway company Deutsche Bahn suggested that Thunberg may not have spent the whole time sitting on the floor. And the 16-year-old Swedish activist later sought to draw a line under the matter by tweeting that she eventually got a seat and that overcrowded trains are a good thing.Some Twitter users expressed pity for Thunberg for not being able to get a proper seat on the train for the long ride home from Madrid, where she was attending the U.N. climate change conference. Others wished her a safe trip home after months of traveling by trains and boats to different climate events in Europe and the United States.Thunberg doesn’t fly on planes because it’s considered harmful to the climate. Last week, she was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for her efforts to prod government and others to take faster actions in fighting climate change.Deutsche Bahn, which used to be famous for its punctuality, has come under fire in recent years for delays, last-minute train cancellations and expensive ticket fares.In Deutsche Bahn’s first reply to the teenager’s initial tweet, the company wished her a good trip back home and adding that “we continue working hard on getting more trains, connections and seats.”Later, however, the railway company wrote in a statement to the media that Thunberg had a seat in first class between Kassel and Hamburg and that other members of her team were already sitting in first class from Frankfurt onwards.In the photo on Twitter, Thunberg is sitting on the floor at the end of a rail car with her back leaning against a suitcase, staring out of a window. There’s an empty food box next to her and more suitcases and backpacks piled up by her side.Later on Sunday, Deutsche Bahn tweeted twice more in regard to Thunberg’s train travels through Germany.
In the first tweet, the company thanks the teenager for supporting Deutsche Bahn’s battle against climate change and pointed out that the train she used had been running 100% on eco-friendly electricity.In the second tweet, however, Deutsche Bahn seemed to suggest that Thunberg hadn’t spent the entire train ride sitting on the floor.The company pointed out to the teenager that “it would have been even nicer if you had also reported how friendly and competently our team served you at your seat in first class.”Thunberg later tweeted that the fact she didn’t first sit in a seat wasn’t meant as a knock against Deutsche Bahn.She wrote that “this is no problem of course and I never said it was. Overcrowded trains is a great sign because it means the demand for train travel is high!” 
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Britain’s main opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn apologized Sunday for waging a disastrous campaign that handed Prime Minister Boris Johnson a mandate to take the UK out of the EU next month.But the veteran socialist defended his far-left platform and blamed the media for helping relegate his century-old party to its worst performance since before World War II.”I will make no bones about it. The election result on Thursday was a body blow for everyone who so desperately needs real change in our country,” Corbyn wrote in the Sunday Mirror newspaper.”I wanted to unite the country that I love but I’m sorry that we came up short and I take my responsibility for it.”Thursday’s snap general election turned into a re-run of the 2016 EU membership referendum in which Johnson championed the Brexit cause.Johnson now commands an 80-vote majority in the 650-seat House of Commons  — a margin last enjoyed by the late Tory icon Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.A sombre but combative Corbyn said Friday that he will step aside once Labour completes a period of “reflection” about its mistakes.The party is expected to have a new leader in place before England votes yet again in local polls in May.Yet the 70-year-old has no clear successor after a year of infighting between a protectionist old guard backed by the unions and more metropolitan members with pro-European views.Corbyn tried to find a balance between the two camps by taking a neutral position on Brexit — a decision that Labour finance spokesman John McDonnell proved to be fatal.”What we tried to do is bring both sides together and we failed,” McDonnell told the BBC.Labour’s campaign was also dogged by allegations of anti-Semitism that forced a handful of senior lawmakers to resign.Corbyn tried to shift the campaign’s focus on bread-and-butter social issues important to Labour voters.”But despite our best efforts, this election was ultimately about Brexit,” Corbyn admitted in his letter.”The Tory campaign, amplified by most of the media, managed to persuade many that only Boris Johnson could ‘get Brexit done’,” he said in reference to Johnson’s campaign slogan.”We will learn the lessons of this defeat.”Soul-searchingThe soul-searching and recriminations have been accompanied by questions in other Western countries about how far left traditionally liberal voters are prepared to go.”Look what happens when the Labour party moves so, so far to the left,” U.S. Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden warned Friday.Yet Corbyn signaled Sunday that he wanted to leave behind a radical legacy that keeps Labour’s focus on vast social spending and redistribution of wealth.He came under intense criticism from more moderate supporters Sunday for claiming that his platform ultimately proved right.”I am proud that on austerity, on corporate power, on inequality and on the climate emergency we have won the arguments and rewritten the terms of political debate,” he wrote in a separate column in The Observer newspaper.Several prominent Labour members who are viewed as potential leaders sharply disagreed.”It’s time to try something different, rather than re-enacting old battles,” lawmaker Jess Phillips wrote in The Observer.”Everywhere I campaign, I heard the same thing. It was less about Brexit and more about belief. In these places of generations of Labour voting, they did not believe a Labour government would or could deliver for them.”Labour parliamentarian Lisa Nandy agreed that the party had “lost touch with the day-to-day… experience of many of the people we want to represent”.”If we are going to represent the country, we need to understand it, to see it as it really is, not how we might imagine it to be,” she wrote in The Observer.    
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Little piggies go to market, but in Germany they also go to court.In a legal first, animal rights activists have asked Germany’s top court to ban the practice of castrating young male pigs without anesthetic – with the piglets themselves listed as the plaintiffs.The painful procedure has become increasingly controversial in Europe and has been banned in Sweden, Norway and Switzerland.Farmers argue that the castration of piglets a few days after birth is necessary to prevent “boar taint”, the occasional occurrence of a foul smell when cooking pork from male pigs past puberty.The German parliament outlawed castration without pain relief in 2013 but it offered farmers a five-year transition period to help them adapt to the change – a timeline that was extended last year until 2021.Outraged by the inaction, the PETA campaign group filed a lawsuit with Germany’s Constitutional Court in November on behalf of the baby pigs.The group wants judges to recognize that pigs have rights similar to human rights and that these are being violated by the “cruel act” of castration without pain relief.”Non-human entities like companies and associations have legal personhood. So why not animals too?” said lawyer Cornelia Ziehm, who is supporting PETA in representing the piglets in court.’Little chance of succeeding’PETA argues that under German law, animals cannot be harmed without reasonable explanation.”The castration of piglets – with or without anesthesia – is in clear violation of this, giving Germany’s male piglets only one option: to sue for the enforcement of their rights in court,” the group said in a statement.The crux of the case is their argument that in Germany “everyone” (jedermann) can file a constitutional complaint if they believe their basic rights have been violated – even a pig.But Jens Buelte, a law professor at Mannheim university, doubted whether the judges in Karlsruhe would see it the same way.”Animals do not have their own rights under German law,” he said, giving PETA’s lawsuit “little chance of succeeding”.Monkey selfieIt is not the first time campaign groups have filed a case on behalf of animals.PETA made global headlines in 2015 when it asked an American court to grant a macaque the copyright to a selfie it snapped on a wildlife photographer’s camera.The picture of the broadly grinning monkey went viral but the court eventually ruled that animals cannot bring copyright infringement suits.PETA condemned the verdict, saying the monkey was “discriminated against simply because he’s a nonhuman animal”.However, in Argentina in 2016 a judge ordered Cecilia the chimpanzee to be released from Mendoza Zoo after agreeing with activists that she was entitled to basic rights and her solitary confinement was unlawful.AlternativesGerman farmers, who remove testicles from roughly 20 million piglets each year, have long resisted the push to end castration without anesthesia.They say there is a lack of workable alternatives to tackle boar taint, in an industry already struggling with fierce foreign competition.Local anesthesia and gene editing are not yet viable or too expensive, they say, and would raise the cost of pork in a country famous for its love of schnitzel and sausage.The government agreed in late 2018 to give the farmers a final two-year extension before the ban takes effect – a decision decried by the opposition Greens and far-left Die Linke, who argued it put the interests of the meat industry above animal protection.Some German pork producers are pinning their hopes on a vaccine that requires just two injections to prevent boar taint – already a popular alternative abroad.A pilot project involving 100,000 German piglets is currently ongoing, though critics say the vaccines are costly too.A similar debate is raging in France, where agriculture minister Didier Guillaume recently said castration of piglets without pain relief should be banned by the end of 2021.
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Albanian prosecutors have issued a series of arrest warrants on charges including murder and abuse of office over the deaths of 51 people killed when a 6.4-magnitude earthquake toppled dozens of buildings last month, police said on Saturday.Police and prosecutors said initial investigations showed “the loss of life in the collapsed buildings came also because their builders, engineers and owners had failed to observe the rules, norms and standards of safe constructions.”Prosecutors issued 17 warrants in total, police said. Two of the nine people detained on Saturday on murder charges were the owners of two hotels that collapsed, killing four people in Durres, Albania’s second-biggest city and main port.A third was the manager of a police vacation hotel where a high-ranking police officer was killed under the rubble.During the three decades since toppling communism in 1990, many Albanians have moved nearer cities, squatting on land and building with little supervision by authorities.Many of the buildings have been legalized since then by governments eager to get votes but also seeking to urbanize such areas by putting in sewage systems and roads.Both hotels on the 10-mile long beach on the Adriatic Sea south of Durres port were built illegally, police said, and the second had also been legalized illegally.Police said that some of the 17 people being sought by prosecutors had fled after the Nov. 26 quake.The high-rises built during the post-Communist boom along the beach are mostly apartments and hotels catering to both Albanians and foreigners, including ethnic Albanians from the Balkans and the Diaspora. Most suffered no damage.Albania has yet to calculate the cost of rebuilding housing for the 14,000 people left homeless by the quake.
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Green activists dumped horse manure and staged a mock hanging outside the venue of a U.N. climate summit in Madrid on Saturday, airing their frustration at the failure of world leaders to take meaningful action against global warming.Led by grass-roots group Extinction Rebellion, the actions were timed to coincide with the closing of the COP25 summit, where negotiators have been unable to agree on how to implement the 2015 Paris climate agreement.”Just like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, this COP’s fiddling of carbon accounting and negotiating of Article 6 is not commensurate to the planetary emergency we face,” Extinction Rebellion said in a statement.Twelve members of the group stood on melting blocks of ice, nooses drawn tight around their necks to symbolize the 12 months remaining until the next summit, when the Paris deal enters a make-or-break implementation phase.Attached to the pile of manure was a short message to leaders saying, “The horses— stops here.”In contrast to a protest held last weekend, in which hundreds of demonstrators blocked one of Madrid’s central shopping streets for a mass disco dance, the mood at the gathering was subdued.’Nothing has really changed'”Even if they reach an agreement, it’s still not enough. This is the 25th COP they’ve had and nothing has really changed,” protester Emma Deane told Reuters from her perch atop an ice block, holding her young daughter in her arms. “She’s going to grow up in a world where there’s no food on the shelves, and that breaks my heart.”Still, Extinction Rebellion spokesman Ronan McNern stressed the importance of humor in the face of the climate crisis.”Out of s— comes the best roses. We hope that the international community comes together to create a beautiful future,” McNern said.
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Leaving the European Union is not the only split British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has to worry about.Johnson’s commanding election victory this week may let him fulfill his campaign promise to “get Brexit done,” but it could also imperil the future of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland and Northern Ireland didn’t vote for Brexit, didn’t embrace this week’s Conservative electoral landslide — and now may be drifting permanently away from London.In a victory speech Friday, Johnson said the election result proved that leaving the EU is “the irrefutable, irresistible, unarguable decision of the British people.”Arguably, though, it isn’t. It’s the will of the English, who make up 56 million of the U.K.’s 66 million people. During Britain’s 2016 referendum on EU membership, England and much smaller Wales voted to leave bloc; Scotland and Ireland didn’t. In Thursday’s election, England elected 345 Conservative lawmakers — all but 20 of the 365 House of Commons seats Johnson’s party won across the U.K.In Scotland, 48 of the 59 seats were won by the Scottish National Party, which opposes Brexit and wants Scotland to become independent of the U.K.SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon said her party’s “emphatic” victory showed that “the kind of future desired by the majority in Scotland is different to that chosen by the rest of the U.K.”The SNP has campaigned for decades to make Scotland independent and almost succeeded in 2014, when Scotland held a referendum on seceding from the U.K. The “remain” side won 55% to 45%.At the time, the referendum was billed as a once-in-a-generation decision. But the SNP argues that Brexit has changed everything because Scotland now faces being dragged out of the EU against its will.Sturgeon said Friday that Johnson “has no mandate whatsoever to take Scotland out of the EU” and Scotland must be able to decide its future in a new independence referendum.Johnson insists he will not approve a referendum during the current term of Parliament, which is due to last until 2024. Johnson’s office said the prime minister told the Scottish leader on Friday that “the result of the 2014 referendum was decisive and should be respected.”The Scotsman newspaper summed up the showdown Saturday with front page face-to-face images of Sturgeon and Johnson: “Two landslides. One collision course.””What we’ve got now is pretty close to a perfect storm,” said historian Tom Devine, professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh. He said the U.K. is facing an “unprecedented constitutional crisis” as Johnson’s refusal to approve a referendum fuels growing momentum for Scottish independence.Politically and legally, it’s a stalemate. Without the approval of the U.K. government, a referendum would not be legally binding. London could simply ignore the result, as the Spanish government did when Catalonia held an unauthorized independence vote in 2017.Mark Diffley, an Edinburgh-based political analyst, said Sturgeon “has said that she doesn’t want a Catalonia-style referendum. She wants to do this properly.”There’s no clear legal route to a second referendum if Johnson refuses, though Sturgeon can apply political and moral pressure. Diffley said the size of the SNP’s win allows Sturgeon to argue that a new referendum is “the will of the people.”Sturgeon said that next week she will lay out a “detailed democratic case for a transfer of power to enable a referendum to be put beyond legal challenge.”Devine said the administrations in Edinburgh and London “are in a completely uncompromising condition” and that will only make the crisis worse.”The longer Johnson refuses to concede a referendum, the greater will the pro-independence momentum in Scotland accelerate,” he said. “By refusing to concede it, Johnson has ironically become a recruiting sergeant for increased militant nationalism.”Northern Ireland has its own set of political parties and structures largely split along British unionist/Irish nationalist lines. There, too, people feel cast adrift by Brexit, and the political plates are shifting.For the first time this week, Northern Ireland elected more lawmakers who favor union with Ireland than want to remain part of the U.K.The island of Ireland, which holds the U.K.’s only land border with the EU, has proved the most difficult issue in Brexit negotiations. Any customs checks or other obstacles along the currently invisible frontier between Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland would undermine both the local economy and Northern Ireland’s peace process.The divorce deal struck between Johnson and the EU seeks to avoid a hard border by keeping Northern Ireland closely aligned to EU rules, which means new checks on goods moving between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K.”Once you put a border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland’s going to be part of a united Ireland for economic purposes,” Jonathan Powell, who helped negotiate Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord, told the BBC. “That will increase the tendency toward a united Ireland for political reasons, too.”I think there is a good chance there will be a united Ireland within 10 years.”In Scotland, Devine also thinks the days of the Union may be numbered.”Anything can happen,” he said. “But I think it’s more likely than not that the U.K. will come to an end over the next 20 to 30 years.
 
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Britain “deserves a break from wrangling, a break from politics and a permanent break from talking about Brexit,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Friday, after his Conservative Party won what Johnson described as an “extraordinary” election.””Let the healing begin,” the prime minister said.Johnson focused his campaigning efforts on the slogan –  “Get Brexit Done.”  He said the parliamentary majority for his Conservative Party will allow him to push through a previously rejected divorce deal with the European Union and carry out Brexit by January 31, 2020.He thanked Labour Party supporters who voted for the Conservative Party for the first time and promised a “One Nation Conservative government.”  “I say thank you for the trust you have placed in us and in me and we will work round the clock to repay your trust and to deliver on your priorities with a Parliament that works for you,” Johnson said.The British leader, who accepted the Queen’s offer earlier Friday to form a government, said there is no one definition for one nation conservatism, “but broadly it refers to the idea the Conservative Party should act for everybody in the UK. That means policies that work for people from different economic backgrounds, from different regions and from the different nations of the UK.”The win gives the Conservatives their biggest margin in parliament since the 1980s.
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Serbian opposition activists have blockaded the entrance of the building hosting the state Radio and Television service (RTS) in Belgrade to protest what they say are deteriorating media freedoms in the Balkan country under populist President Aleksandar Vucic.
Members of the Alliance of Serbia (SzS), an opposition umbrella group, began the eight-hour blockade at noon in the capital on December 13, holding a banner reading “EU, It’s Your Choice: Vucic Or Democracy” in both English and Serbian.WATCH: video report
Serbian independent media have repeatedly complained of being pressured by officials and have accused the government of fueling an atmosphere of intolerance toward journalists.
Vucic, who vowed to lead Serbia toward European Union membership, has been accused of curbing media freedoms and democracy, accusations he has denied.
The activists called on RTS to “perform its role and inform the public on all issues that matter.”
Vuk Jeremic, the leader of the People’s Party and the SzS chairman, said the protesters had no intention of entering the building and that they were not seeking personnel changes.
Jeremic told a news conference that “members of SzS organizations, activists, and citizens” blocked the entrance because the RTS, as he put it, “has been blocking the truth for the past eight years.”
Vucic’s ruling Serbian Progressive Party ascended to power in 2012. Vucic has been president since 2017 and his government has strengthened relations with traditional Slavic ally Russia.
Jeremic also said that the move was a “warning” to RTS journalists that they “should do their job professionally.”
He said that while the blockade was peaceful, participants were concerned about possible provocateurs “sent by Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party.”
Police refused to sanction the protest because the request was not filed at least five days in advance, Jeremic said.
The rally came a day after a few dozen Serbian journalists staged a protest in Belgrade against what they said were deteriorating media freedoms under Vucic.
Members of the Independent Journalists’ Association said there have been more than 100 cases of pressure and attacks on the media in the past year alone.
The protest also marked a year since the house of journalist Milan Jovanovic was torched outside Belgrade. Jovanovic was investigating alleged local government corruption. He escaped the fire, but his home burned to the ground.
The suspected arsonists are currently on trial. A senior official in Vucic’s ruling party has been accused of ordering the attack, which he has denied.With reporting by AP
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Britons woke Friday to an utterly transformed political landscape following an electoral earthquake that has ripped up modern British politics, and whose tremors will be felt for years to come.  Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s emphatic win in the country’s third general election in four years — giving the Conservatives, also known as Tories, their biggest parliamentary majority in more than a quarter of a century — marks a decisive turn in the country’s fortunes following the instability triggered by the 2016 Brexit referendum, say analysts.Armed with an 80-seat majority, the biggest at a general election since Margaret Thatcher’s in 1987, Johnson’s government now will be able to end the deadlock in Britain’s Parliament and deliver on the Conservative promise to “get Brexit done” without further delay. Britain will almost certainly exit the European Union by the end of January, triggering a second and likely trickier stage of negotiations with Brussels over the country’s future political and trade relations with the European continent.Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson delivers a statement at Downing Street after winning the general election, in London, Britain, Dec. 13, 2019.Speaking from the steps of No. 10 Downing Street, Johnson said Thursday’s election results show the “irrefutable” decision of the British people is to leave the EU and to end the “miserable threats” of a second Brexit referendum, a rerun plebiscite backed by Britain’s main opposition party, Labor, and the centrist Liberal Democrats.The huge victory, which saw the country’s main opposition Labor Party record its worst electoral performance since 1935, is a vindication of Johnson’s decision, say analysts, to focus the election campaigning on Brexit and not to be drawn in too much by Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn’s effort to make the poll about the crumbling state of Britain’s public services. Johnson’s strategy was posited on the idea that Britons, even those who would prefer to remain in the EU, have become sick and tired of the long-running Brexit mess and want the saga to end.’Red wall’Johnson also had his fair share of luck, “the biggest piece of which was Jeremy Corbyn,” according to Daniel Finkelstein, a onetime adviser to former Conservative leader David Cameron and now a columnist with The Times. “Corbyn kept more moderate Conservatives voting Tory even when they had doubts about Boris Johnson. He neither united the liberal left and center behind a policy of stopping Brexit nor the traditional Labor vote behind a populist manifesto,” he said.Britain’s opposition Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn leaves Islington Town Hall through the backdoor after a meeting following the results of the general election in London, Britain, Dec. 13, 2019.In the final days of the campaign, Johnson focused on Labor’s so-called “red wall” of constituencies searching for cracks to widen in former mining towns and farming villages crucial to the Conservatives’ hopes of winning Thursday’s election, warning voters they face a “great Brexit betrayal,” if they voted for an increasingly metropolitan and far-left Labor Party.On Thursday, Johnson managed not just to breach what was once considered an impregnable wall, but he bulldozed through it by persuading traditional working-class voters who favor Brexit in the north of England to ditch their lifetime habit of voting Labor. Constituencies that have been synonymous with Labor for decades fell like dominoes — seats like Workington in the northwest English county of Cumbria, which has been held by Labor for 97 out of the last 100 years.
Johnson’s Landslide Victory Sets Britain On Course for January Brexit video player.
Liberal Democrats candidate Jo Swinson speaks after losing her seat in East Dunbartonshire constituency, at a counting center for Britain’s general election in Bishopbriggs, Britain, Dec. 13, 2019.Labor moderates want him to go immediately, and they fear he wants to oversee the choice of his successor, which his internal party opponents see as a sign that he and the left wing of the party will not easily relinquish control.  Left-wingers attribute the party’s failure to Brexit and say it has nothing to do with Corbyn or his ideology. Richard Burgon, the shadow justice secretary, tweeted that this had been a “Brexit election.” “Johnson must continue to be fought with radical alternatives, not triangulation, that challenge the Tories head-on,” he added.But moderate Labor candidates say that on the doorsteps while campaigning, they found the main problem for the party wasn’t Brexit but deep distrust for the Labor leader. They note that while Labor did worse in seats that voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum, they also fared badly in constituencies that voted to remain in the EU.One Labor candidate, Phil Wilson, who failed to keep what had been a safe Labor seat in the north, said it was “mendacious nonsense” for Corbyn loyalists to blame the result on Brexit. “Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was a bigger problem,” he said. “To say otherwise is delusional.”Scotland, Northern IrelandDespite their huge win, the victorious Conservatives will face challenges of their own, say analysts, both when it comes to Brexit and in terms of London’s relations with Scotland and Northern Ireland.Johnson’s victory may have seen a remaking of the Conservatives, a party now more working-class than it has ever been, but it may have come at the cost of unmaking Great Britain. North of the English border, in Scotland, the pro-EU Scottish Nationalists, or SNP, also pulled off a landslide win, heralding a coming battle over Scottish independence and setting London and Edinburgh on course for a possible constitutional showdown that risks being fraught as the current clash in Spain between Catalan separatists and Madrid.Scottish National Party (SNP) leader and Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaks in Edinburgh, Dec. 13, 2019.The nationalists gained a dozen seats as the Tories, Labor and the Liberal Democrats were wiped out north of the border with the SNP winning 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats, up from the 35 it won in 2017. The SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, vowed Friday to formally request a second independence referendum before the end of the year, saying that the election results north and south of the border showed “the divergent paths” Scotland and the rest of the UK are on.”Boris Johnson has a mandate to take England out of the EU, but he must accept that I have a mandate to give Scotland a choice for an alternative future,” Sturgeon told the BBC. Johnson repeatedly has promised to reject any demand for another independence ballot, saying that if there is any formal demand, “we will mark that letter return to sender and be done with it.”Nationalists enjoyed success, too, in British-run Northern Ireland. For the first time, nationalists, who favor reunification with the Irish Republic, now hold a majority of seats in the province, which voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum.Brexit debateOn Brexit, Johnson likely will continue to face internal Conservative party disputes, say analysts, with half his Cabinet favoring a so-called soft Brexit, entailing a close trading and political relationship with the EU. Johnson is aiming to conclude a trade deal with the EU by the end of 2020, but EU leaders have warned the timetable is unrealistic and the complicated negotiations will be daunting and take years.  European Council President Charles Michel speaks during a news conference in Brussels, Belgium, Dec. 13, 2019.The new president of the European Council, Charles Michel, warned that Brussels won’t agree to a free trade deal that does excludes Britain agreeing to abide by EU regulatory rules and product standards. “The EU is ready for the next phase,” he said. “We will negotiate a future trade deal, which ensures a true level playing field,” he added.EU officials formally welcomed Johnson’s victory but added they hope the prime minister will negotiate a “close as possible future relationship.” Some European officials say the Conservatives’ big parliamentary majority should give Johnson political space to maneuver and override the objections of those Tories who want a “clean break” with the EU.Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit Party, which failed to win any parliamentary seats Thursday, says he fears Johnson will pivot now that he has a large majority and will eventually conclude a closer relationship with the EU than hard-line Brexiters would like.
 
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Britain looks certain to leave the European Union by the end of January after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson secured a big majority of 78 seats in Thursday’s general election. His Conservative Party seized control of dozens of constituencies that had voted to leave in the 2016 referendum, vindicating Johnson’s decision to call an election. However,  as Henry Ridgwell reports, the country remains deeply divided – and the prime minister will face big challenges early on in his new term.
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Russia said on Friday it was alarmed after the United States tested a ground-launched ballistic missile that would have been prohibited under the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the RIA news agency reported.The United States carried out the test on Thursday. Washington formally withdrew from the 1987 INF pact with Russia in August after determining that Moscow was violating the treaty, an accusation the Kremlin has denied.”It alarms us. Of course we will take this into account,” said Vladimir Ermakov, head of the foreign ministry’s arms control and non-proliferation department.It was the second test by the United States that would have been prohibited under the INF treaty and too place as the future of another major nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and the United States is under question.New START, the last remaining major nuclear arms control treaty between the two countries, is due to expire in February 2021 and Moscow has warned there is already not enough time left to negotiate a full-fledged replacement.
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Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has won a solid majority of seats in Britain’s Parliament — a decisive outcome to a Brexit-dominated election that should allow Johnson to fulfill his plan to take the U.K. out of the European Union next month.With just over 600 of the 650 seats declared, the Conservatives reached the 326 mark, guaranteeing their majority.Johnson said it looked like the Conservatives had “a powerful new mandate to get Brexit done.”The victory will likely make Johnson the most electorally successful Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher, another politician who was loved and loathed in almost equal measure. It was a disaster for left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who faced calls for his resignation even as the results rolled in. The party looked set to gain around 200 seats.Corbyn called the result “very disappointing” for his party and said he would not lead Labour into another election, though he resisted calls to quit immediately,Results poured in early Friday showing a substantial shift in support to the Conservatives from Labour. In the last election in 2017, the Conservatives won 318 seats and Labour 262.The result this time looked set to be the biggest Tory majority since Thatcher’s 1980s’ heyday, and Labour’s lowest number of seats since 1935.The Scottish National Party appeared set to take about 50 of Scotland’s 59 seats — a big increase — with a lackluster dozen or so for the centrist, pro-EU Liberal Democrats. Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson lost her own Scottish seat.The Conservatives took a swathe of seats in post-industrial northern England towns that were long Labour strongholds. Labour’s vote held up better in London, where the party managed to grab the Putney seat from the Conservatives.The decisive Conservative showing vindicates Johnson’s decision to press for Thursday’s early election, which was held nearly two years ahead of schedule. He said that if the Conservatives won a majority, he would get Parliament to ratify his Brexit divorce deal and take the U.K. out of the EU by the current Jan. 31 deadline.Speaking at the election count in his Uxbridge constituency in suburban London, Johnson said the “historic” election “gives us now, in this new government, the chance to respect the democratic will of the British people to change this country for the better and to unleash the potential of the entire people of this country.”That message appears to have had strong appeal for Brexit-supporting voters, who turned away from Labour in the party’s traditional heartlands and embraced Johnson’s promise that the Conservatives would “get Brexit done.”“I think Brexit has dominated, it has dominated everything by the looks of it,” said Labour economy spokesman John McDonnell. “We thought other issues could cut through and there would be a wider debate, from this evidence there clearly wasn’t.”The prospect of Brexit finally happening more than three years after Britons narrowly voted to leave the EU marks a momentous shift for both the U.K. and the bloc. No country has ever left the union, which was created in the decades after World War II to bring unity to a shattered continent.But a decisive Conservative victory would also provide some relief to the EU, which has grown tired of Britain’s Brexit indecision.Britain’s departure will start a new phase of negotiations on future relations between Britain and the 27 remaining EU members.EU Council President Charles Michel promised that EU leaders meeting Friday would send a “strong message” to the next British government and parliament about next steps.“We are ready to negotiate,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.The pound surged when an exit poll forecast the Tory win, jumping over two cents against the dollar, to $1.3445, the highest in more than a year and a half. Many Investors hope a Conservative win would speed up the Brexit process and ease, at least in the short term, some of the uncertainty that has corroded business confidence since the 2016 vote.Many voters casting ballots on Thursday hoped the election might finally find a way out of the Brexit stalemate in this deeply divided nation. Three and a half years after the U.K. voted by 52%-48% to leave the EU, Britons remain split over whether to leave the 28-nation bloc, and lawmakers have proved incapable of agreeing on departure terms.On a dank, gray day with outbreaks of blustery rain, voters went to polling stations in schools, community centers, pubs and town halls after a bad-tempered five-week campaign rife with mudslinging and misinformation.Opinion polls had given the Conservatives a steady lead, but the result was considered hard to predict, because the issue of Brexit cuts across traditional party loyalties.Johnson campaigned relentlessly on a promise to “Get Brexit done” by getting Parliament to ratify his “oven-ready” divorce deal with the EU and take Britain out of the bloc as scheduled on Jan. 31.The Conservatives focused much of their energy on trying to win in a “red wall” of working-class towns in central and northern England that have elected Labour lawmakers for decades but also voted strongly in 2016 to leave the EU. That effort got a boost when the Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage decided at the last minute not to contest 317 Conservative-held seats to avoid splitting the pro-Brexit vote.Labour, which is largely but ambiguously pro-EU, faced competition for anti-Brexit voters from the centrist Liberal Democrats, Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties, and the Greens.But on the whole Labour tried to focus the campaign away from Brexit and onto its radical domestic agenda, vowing to tax the rich, nationalize industries such as railroads and water companies and give everyone in the country free internet access. It campaigned heavily on the future of the National Health Service, a deeply respected institution that has struggled to meet rising demand after nine years of austerity under Conservative-led governments.It appears that wasn’t enough to boost Labour’s fortunes. Defeat will likely spell the end for Corbyn, a veteran socialist who moved his party sharply to the left after taking the helm in 2015, but who now looks to have led his left-of-center party to two electoral defeats since 2017. The 70-year-old left-winger was also accused of allowing anti-Semitism to spread within the party.“It’s Corbyn,” said former Labour Cabinet minister Alan Johnson, when asked about the poor result. “We knew he was incapable of leading, we knew he was worse than useless at all the qualities you need to lead a political party.”For many voters, the election offered an unpalatable choice. Both Johnson and Corbyn have personal approval ratings in negative territory, and both have been dogged by questions about their character.Johnson has been confronted with past broken promises, untruths and offensive statements, from calling the children of single mothers “ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate” to comparing Muslim women who wear face-covering veils to “letter boxes.”Yet, his energy and determination proved persuasive to many voters.“It’s a big relief, looking at the exit polls as they are now, we’ve finally got that majority a working majority that we have not had for 3 1/2 years,” said Conservative-supporting writer Jack Rydeheard. “We’ve got the opportunity to get Brexit done and get everything else that we promised as well. That’s investment in the NHS, schools, hospitals you name it — it’s finally a chance to break that deadlock in Parliament.”
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Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party will win an overwhelming victory in Britain’s election with a majority of 86 seats in parliament to deliver Brexit on Jan. 31, an exit poll showed Thursday.The exit poll showed Johnson’s Conservatives would win a landslide of 368 seats, more than enough for a very comfortable majority in the 650-seat parliament and the biggest Conservative national election win since Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 triumph.Labour were forecast by the poll to win 191 seats, the worst result for the party since 1935. The Scottish National Party would win 55 seats and the Liberal Democrats 13, the poll said.The Brexit Party were not forecast to win any.”That would be a phenomenal victory for the Conservative Party and Boris Johnson will feel completely vindicated with the gamble that he took,” said John Bercow, the former speaker of the House of Commons.”That would be an absolutely dramatic victory,” he said.Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrives with his dog Dilyn at a polling station, at the Methodist Central Hall, to vote in the general election in London, Britain, Dec. 12, 2019.Sterling surged after the exit poll, hitting its highest against the euro since July 2016, shortly after the Brexit referendum. Versus the dollar it jumped 2.3% to $1.3480.Official results will be declared over the next seven hours.In the last five national elections, only one exit poll has got the outcome wrong — in 2015 when the poll predicted a hung parliament when in fact the Conservatives won a majority, taking 14 more seats than forecast.If the exit poll is accurate and Johnson’s bet on a snap election has paid off, he will move swiftly to ratify the Brexit deal he struck with the European Union so that the United Kingdom can leave on Jan. 31, 2020 — 10 months later than initially planned.Britain’s paralysis Johnson called the first Christmas election since 1923 to break what he said was the paralysis of Britain’s political system after more than three years of crisis over how, when or even if to leave the European Union.The face of the “Leave” campaign in the 2016 referendum, 55-year-old Johnson fought the election under the slogan of “Get Brexit Done,” promising to end the deadlock and spend more on health, education and the police.The exit poll was produced by three broadcasters — the BBC, ITV and Sky — who teamed up to jointly produce similar surveys in the last three elections, held in 2010, 2015 and 2017.In 2010 and 2017, their exit polls accurately predicted the overall outcome and were close to forecasting the correct number of seats for the two main parties.Johnson’s strategy was to breach Labour’s so-called “Red Wall” of seats across the Brexit-supporting areas of the Midlands and northern England where he cast his political opponents as the out-of-touch enemies of Brexit.Brexit far from overWhile a majority will allow Johnson to lead the United Kingdom out of the club it first joined in 1973, Brexit is far from over: He faces the daunting task of negotiating a trade agreement with the EU in just 11 months.After Jan. 31, Britain will enter a transition period during which it will negotiate a new relationship with the EU27.This can run until the end of December 2022 under the current rules, but the Conservatives made an election promise not to extend the transition period beyond the end of 2020.
 
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