Turkey’s president Wednesday criticized the European Union’s decision to launch a maritime effort focused on enforcing the U.N arms embargo around Libya, accusing European nations that agreed to the operation of “interfering in the region.”Recep Tayyip Erdogan also hailed a decision by Libya’s U.N.-supported government to withdraw from talks with rivals following an attack Tuesday on the sea port of the Libyan capital, Tripoli.EU foreign ministers agreed earlier this week to end Operation Sophia, the bloc’s naval mission in the Mediterranean Sea, and launch a maritime effort focused more on implementing the U.N. arms embargo around Libya.Operation Sophia was set up in 2015 as tens of thousands of migrants headed across the sea from North Africa to Europe. Its aim was to crack down on migrant smugglers, but also to enforcethe 2011 arms embargo, which is routinely being flouted.EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said several European countries had offered to take part in the new operation.“I want to specifically mention that the EU does not have the right to make any decision concerning Libya,” Erdogan said in a speech to legislators from his ruling party in parliament. “The EU is trying to take charge of the situation and interfere.”Libya has been in turmoil since 2011, when a civil war toppled long-time dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who was later killed. Relentless turmoil subsequently engulfed the oil-rich country, which is now split between rival governments based in its east and west, each backed by an array of foreign countries apparently jockeying for influence to control Libya’s resources.The U.N.-supported government in Tripoli is backed by Turkey and Qatar. On the other side are the eastern-based forces of commander Khalifa Hifter, which rely on military assistance from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, as well as France and Russia.Hifter was in Moscow on Wednesday and met with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.The parties “noted the important role” of talks that took place in Moscow on Jan. 13 in “implementing a ceasefire and starting the process of normalizing the situation in the country.” The statement also reiterated the need to comply with decisions made during a Berlin peace summit last month.In the Berlin conference, world powers and other countries with interests in Libya’s long-running civil war agreed to respect the much-violated arms embargo, hold off on military support to the warring parties, and push the sides to reach a full cease-fire.The U.N. special envoy to for Libya, Ghassan Salame, however has accused some countries of stepping up weapons deliveries to Libya’s warring sides in hopes of a military victory.Fighting between the country’s factions has intensified over the past year. Recently, Turkey sent hundreds of Syrian fighters, including militants affiliated with groups such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State group, to fight on behalf of the Tripoli-based government to defend the city from Hifter’s offensive.The Turkish leader also voiced support for Tuesday’s decision by the Tripoli-based government to suspend participation in U.N.-brokered talks in Geneva, following an attack by Hifter’s forces on Tripoli’s port.“It is the right decision,” Erdogan said.He added that Turkey would continue supporting the Tripoli-based government to “establish dominance” over the whole of the country.Hifter’s forces claimed they hit a weapons and ammunition depot at the port on Tuesday “to weaken the combat capabilities of the mercenaries who arrived from Syria” to fight alongside Tripoli-based militias.The Geneva talks between Libya’s warring sides had resumed earlier on Tuesday in a bid to salvage a fragile cease-fire in the North African nation. The current cease-fire was brokered by Russia and Turkey on Jan. 12 to deescalate the fight for control of Tripoli, but both sides have repeatedly violated the truce. 
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An international appeals court in the Netherlands has ordered Russia to pay $50 billion in compensation to shareholders of the former oil company, Yukos.It is the latest chapter in a long-running saga that came to define Russia’s political and business climate in the early years of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule.According to the ruling issued by The Hague Court of Appeal, Yukos — the one-time oil giant owned by Russian businessman-turned-Kremlin-foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky — unfairly lost tens of billions of dollars in revenue after Khodorkovsky was jailed and his company seized by the Russian government amid unpaid tax claims in 2004.Tuesday’s ruling in effect reinstated an earlier 2014 court-ordered compensation package that had been overturned during a later appeal that went in Russia’s favor.The court ruled that decision “not correct,” adding “the arbitration order is in force again.”Yukos alumni and allies celebrated the decision. “This is a victory for the rule of law,” Tim Osborne, chief executive of GML, a company that represents Yukos shareholders, said in a statement. “The independent courts of a democracy have shown their integrity and served justice. A brutal kleptocracy has been held to account.”Russia’s Justice Ministry indicated it would appeal the decision, arguing the court ”failed to take into account the illegitimate use by former Yukos shareholders of the Energy Charter Treaty that wasn’t ratified by the Russian Federation.”The ministry also noted that a 2011 European Court for Human Rights review had rejected allegations the case against Yukos was politically motivated.In a message posted on Facebook, Khodorkovsky denied that he had gained financially from the decision, but celebrated its outcome nonetheless.“For it has confirmed not only in procedure but in essence: The seizure of Yukos was not about taxes, but a fight with a political opponent,” he said.New president, ambitious oligarchThe Yukos case played an outsized role in defining what kind of Russia Putin would come to build.On the surface, it was a business dispute. The Kremlin argued that Khodorkovsky and his company owed millions in unpaid taxes. In reality, it was more about politics and power.  Putin, still relatively new to the Kremlin post in the early 2000s, sought to assert himself over powerful business barons — the so-called oligarchs — who had played a big role in government affairs under his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.Putin’s offer: Stay out of politics and keep your wealth.  While some took the warning seriously, Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s wealthiest man, continued to openly fund Russia’s budding civil society and liberal political parties.  To supporters, Khodorkovsky represented the best of an emerging Russian business culture — a reformed oligarch looking to play by western rules of transparency and fair play.To his detractors, including Putin, he was merely a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  The arrestA turning point was a meeting with Putin and the business elite in 2003, in which Khodorkovsky and the Kremlin leader openly sparred over corruption.Six months later, FSB agents stormed Khodorkovsky’s plane at a Siberian airport. Russia’s wealthiest man was now its most famous prisoner.  An initial trial found him guilty of tax evasion and sentenced him to nine years in prison. A second criminal investigation added money laundering and additional years to Khodorkovsky’s prison term.Amnesty International labeled the former tycoon a prisoner of conscience.Meanwhile, the Kremlin oversaw Yukos’s dismantling, divvying up its prized assets to a new cadre of Kremlin loyalists at bargain prices until the oil giant was bankrupt.Life after prison  Putin freed Khodorkovsky as part of a wider amnesty ahead of the Sochi Games in 2014 — and a promise the businessman would stay out of politics.  Yet Russia, and Putin, have remained the focus of Khodorkovsky’s work after he fled Russia for Europe.He relaunched his NGO, Open Russia, with an eye toward reforming Russian civil society and insuring free and fair elections.  The organization was put on Russia’s “undesirable organizations” list in 2017, and its employees were routinely hounded by police.In a further sign that Khodorkovsky’s activities are perceived as a threat to the Kremlin, Putin proposed a ban on Russians who lived abroad from assuming the presidency, amid a wide-ranging set of reforms to the constitution earlier this year.  The amendment, currently under review by Russian lawmakers, seemed almost tailor-made to Khodorkovsky.And yet, it was another constitutional amendment suggested by Putin — that Russia no longer abide by international court decisions when it felt its state interests were infringed — that seemed to anticipate today’s Hague ruling in favor of compensation.Indeed, while Khodorkovsky acknowledged money to Yukos would likely not be forthcoming, he waxed lyrical on Russia’s future beyond the Putin era. “Russia is my homeland. And my homeland has no secret accounts, does not rob companies, and has no political opponents,” Khodorkovsky said on Twitter. “It has only sons.”Россия мне и не должна. Россия – моя Родина, а Родина тайных счетов не имеет, компании не ворует и политических противников у нее нет. Только сыновья. А вот с Кремлем счеты не закрыты и луж для всех кремлевских приготовлено еще не мало. pic.twitter.com/uzGrq5KZgy— Ходорковский Михаил (@mich261213) February 18, 2020
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When avalanches crash down mountainsides, it is a race against time to find those buried in the snow.  Rescue teams rush to emergency sites.  At that point, they deploy their secret weapon.  VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports rescue dogs dig deep for disaster relief.
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Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro repeated a debunked sexually charged allegation about one of the country’s more prominent journalists on Tuesday, drawing fire from press freedom advocates and even some recent allies.Bolsonaro referred to Patricia Campos Mello, a reporter for newspaper Folha de S. Paulo who last year won the International Press Freedom Award after coverage of his presidential campaign. She’d also been honored for earlier reporting from the Middle East, U.S. and Africa.A witness in a congressional hearing testified she had insinuated an offer of sex in exchange for help with a story that triggered an investigation of Bolsonaro’s campaign by Brazil’s top electoral court. Her newspaper quickly debunked the assertion by releasing transcripts, screenshots and recordings of their conversations.Still, Bolsonaro echoed the insinuation as he spoke outside the presidential residence in Brasilia.“He talked about the journalist’s harassment, hitting on him. She wanted a scoop, she wanted to give a scoop, at any price, against me,” Bolsonaro said with a smile, using a Portuguese word for “scoop” that can have sexual connotations. That drew laughs from his supporters.Hours later Bolsonaro spoke to journalists again at the same spot. “Is there anyone from Folha there? So I sexually attacked your reporter? OK. I don’t want to talk to you,” he said before walking away.FILE – Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro greets supporters after attending a Changing of the Guard at the Planalto Presidential Palace, in Brasilia, Nov. 28, 2019.The Brazilian Press Association issued a statement calling Bolsonaro’s comment cowardly and embarrassing to Brazilians.“This misogynous behavior is undeserving of the office of the President and an affront to the Constitution,” the statement said.Folha, issued a statement calling Bolsonaro’s comment an attack to all professional journalists. “He also tars the dignity, the honor and the decorum as stated by the law for the exercise of the presidency,” the daily added.Campos Mello declined to comment on Bolsonaro’s insult.She has suffered online abuse and received threats from supporters of the Brazilian president since October 2018, when Folha published her report on a network of businessmen who allegedly sponsored the production of false news against rival candidate, Fernando Haddad.The wave of insults against the journalist returned last week after the testimony in Congress.Like U.S. President Donald Trump, Bolsonaro frequently speaks off the cuff, doesn’t shy from comments perceived as politically incorrect and often uses the press as a foil to rally support. He has repeatedly said that journalists willfully misconstrue his statements and are seeking to undermine his administration.The incident in Brasilia follows two recent examples of Bolsonaro making offensive arm gestures at a group of journalists.The Brazilian association of investigative journalism and the Brazilian bar association’s press freedom branch issued a joint statement Tuesday expressing “vehement repudiation” of Tuesday’s statement.Even the right-wing party that sponsored Bolsonaro’s run for president repudiated his comments. The Social Liberal Party said called the president’s attacks unacceptable and said “they deserve the repudiation of good Brazilians.” 
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Turkey’s civil society swung from hope to despair Tuesday after a new arrest warrant was issued for leading rights defender Osman Kavala just hours after a court ordered his release from jail.Kavala and eight other defendants were acquitted by a court outside Istanbul in the highly controversial Gezi Park trial.But within hours, a new warrant from the Istanbul prosecutor’s office called for his arrest as part of the investigation into a failed 2016 coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.FILE – Osman Kavala, April 29, 2015It was not immediately clear if Kavala would be released from jail, where he has spent more than 800 days in pre-trial detention.The judge had earlier said there was “not enough concrete evidence” that he and the other defendants sought to overthrow the government.Seven other defendants, who remain on the run, were not formally acquitted.Kavala, the only defendant kept in jail throughout the trial, faced a life sentence without parole if convicted for his alleged role in orchestrating the Gezi Park protests of 2013 that presented the first major challenge to Erdogan, then prime minister.News of a fresh arrest warrant came as supporters waited for him to be released from the Silivri court and prison complex, and was met with shocked silence.Kavala has became a symbol of what critics say is a crackdown on civil society under Erdogan, and received loud cheers as he left the packed courtroom in Silivri, on the outskirts of Istanbul.’Mockery’The mass protests of 2013 began over plans to demolish Gezi Park — one of the only green spaces in Istanbul’s center — but quickly spiraled into broader demonstrations against the government.Critics have called the Gezi trial “a mockery” in which the prosecution failed to present any evidence of wrong-doing by the defendants.”This is a trial that should have never happened in the first place. This whole process has caused untold misery to those who were so wrongfully targeted,” Emma Sinclair-Webb of Human Rights Watch told AFP at the courthouse.Turkish sociologist Ayse Bugra, wife of Turkish rights defender Osman Kavala, reacts after Istanbul prosecutors issued a new arrest warrant for Kavala, in Silivri, near Istanbul, Feb. 18, 2020.Andrew Gardner of Amnesty International had earlier warned that the verdict should not create too much optimism.There are “countless other trials of journalists, of opposition political activists, of human rights defenders. The justice system is completely devoid of independence and impartiality in Turkey,” he told AFP.In December, the European Court of Human Rights heavily criticized the quality of the Gezi Park prosecution.It ruled that the 657-page indictment against Kavala lacked “facts, information or evidence” to raise even the suspicion that he helped organize the protests, let alone attempted to overthrow the government, and called for his immediate release.The Turkish court still put Kavala and the other defendants through two more hearings in December and January.The acquittal was welcomed by several foreign observers, including the U.S. embassy in Ankara and the Council of Europe, a 47-nation body overseeing human rights, of which Turkey is a member.Among the criticisms of the trial was the fact that defense lawyers were denied the chance to cross-examine the key government witness, identified as Murat Papuc, when he gave evidence in December after he claimed his life was in danger.Ekrem Imamoglu, mayor of Istanbul metropolitan municipality, speaks during a rally in Istanbul, Feb. 18, 2020.Lawyers also decried the inclusion of testimony from a police officer convicted of kicking a Gezi Park protester to death in July 2013, who now portrays himself as a victim of the demonstrations.The defendants received support from Ekrem Imamoglu, the new high-profile mayor of Istanbul who took control of the city out of the hands of the ruling party last year.”The acquittal of all the defendants in the #GeziPark trial is a true source of joy, and restores trust in the Turkish judicial system. I salute all those who stand to defend our city’s history, culture and nature,” he tweeted.Kavala’s supporters say he was targeted because he worked to build bridges across Turkey’s often fractious ethnic and social divides, in contrast to the combative rhetoric favored by Erdogan’s ruling party.
 
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French President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday he would curb the practice of foreign countries sending imams and teachers to France to crack down on what he called the risk of “separatism.”Macron has so far stayed away from issues related to France’s Muslim community, the biggest in Europe, focusing instead on economic reforms.Mayoral elections a month awayIn a much-anticipated intervention less than a month before mayoral elections, Macron said he would gradually put an end to the system in which Algeria, Morocco and Turkey send imams to France to preach in mosques.”This end to the consular Islam system is extremely important to curb foreign influence and make sure everybody respects the laws of the republic,” he told a news conference in the eastern city of Mulhouse.Macron said 300 imams were sent to France every year by these countries, and that those who arrived in 2020 would be the last to arrive in such numbers.He said his government had asked the body representing Islam in France to find solutions to train imams on French soil instead, make sure they can speak French and don’t spread Islamist views.Macron, who is constantly attacked by far-right leader Marine Le Pen on the issue of how to integrate French Muslims, also said he would end the practice of French students being taught by teachers paid by foreign governments.Deal with Turkey lackingFrance has agreements with nine countries, including Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, whereby their governments can send teachers to French schools to teach languages to students originally from these countries.Macron said he had found an agreement to end the practice with all of these countries except Turkey.”I won’t let any country, whatever it is, feed separatism,” Macron said. “You can’t have Turkish law on French soil. That can’t be.”France has suffered major attacks by Islamist militants in recent years. Co-ordinated bombings and shootings in November 2015 at the Bataclan theatre and other sites around Paris killed 130 people — the deadliest attacks in France since World War Two.
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The Trump administration announced sanctions Tuesday on a Russian state-controlled brokerage that has helped the Venezuelan government skirt an American oil embargo and enabled President Nicolas Maduro keep his grip on power in the South American country.Administration officials said Rosneft Trading S.A. and its president, Didier Casimiro, would be added to a financial blacklist in a move that is expected to largely freeze him and the company out of the global financial system.The action is an unusually strong move against a company linked to the Russian state and amounts to a substantial escalation of a U.S.-led campaign that has failed to oust Maduro from power.Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Rosneft Trading is the primary broker for the sale and transportation of Venezuelan crude oil.”Rosneft Trading has propped up the dictatorial Maduro, enabling his repression of the Venezuelan people,” he said in announcing the sanctions.Rosneft Trading is incorporated in Switzerland and Russian-owned, according to the State Department. The parent company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.But Russian lawmaker Pavel Zavalny said the country would continue to cooperate with Venezuela in the energy sector despite the U.S. sanctions. “One doesn’t abandon friends in need,” Zavalny said.The U.S. and about 60 other countries say Maduro’s reelection in 2018 was not legitimate and have recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim president.The U.S. is considering additional economic sanctions aimed at further tightening economic pressure on the Maduro government, the special U.S. envoy for Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, told reporters.Maduro has held on to power despite runaway hyperinflation, a massive exodus and shortages of food and medicine and the international pressure that has left his socialist administration isolated.Venezuela managed to ship hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil last year with the help of Rosneft Trading despite sanctions on its petroleum sector imposed by the Trump administration last year.FILE – The leader of Venezuela’s political opposition Juan Guaido makes a speech at the Madrid regional government building during a visit to Madrid, Spain, Jan. 25, 2020.Opposition leader Juan Guaido called the latest sanctions a “new victory!””Whoever supports the dictator, from whatever part of the world, will bear the consequences,” Guaido tweeted. “Those who collaborate with democracy will be welcomed.”Guaido launched a campaign to oust Maduro a year ago but so far has failed to make it a reality. He has been unable to flip the military’s loyalty away from Maduro.In recent months the Venezuelans who had fervently supported Guaido early on had stopped filling the streets for demonstrations, and Maduro has grown emboldened.The action against Rosneft Trading and Casamiro means that any assets they have in the U.S. or in the control of U.S. financial institutions will be frozen. In addition, anyone who does business with them could face American sanctions, which senior administration officials told reporters should largely freeze the company out of the global financial system.The officials said the move was not expected to have a significant effect on global oil prices.Officials also said that President Donald Trump approved the move. They said he has spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the past about U.S. objections to his country’s support for Maduro.
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Ukraine and Russia-backed separatists blamed each other for an outbreak of fighting in the country’s rebel-held east on Tuesday.Ukraine’s military said in a statement that the separatists attempted to advance into the Ukraine-controlled territory but were repelled.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy denounced the attack as a “cynical provocation.”Separatist authorities in the Luhansk region, however, blamed Ukraine for starting the fighting. They claimed the fighting erupted when a group of Ukrainian soldiers tried to make an incursion into rebel-held territory near the village of Holubovske, but got into a minefield.The chief of the General Staff of Ukraine’s armed forces, Colonel-General Ruslan Khomchak, said one Ukrainian soldier was killed and another five were wounded in combat. He said four separatists were killed and six others were wounded.The separatists said two Ukrainian troops were killed and three others were wounded and the Ukrainian forces launched an artillery barrage to cover their evacuation.They said a civilian resident in Holubovske was wounded by the Ukrainian shelling that also damaged civilian infrastructure in the villages of Kirovsk and Donetskiy.The exchange of gunfire marks the latest spike in hostilities in the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine that has killed over 14,000 people since 2014.A 2015 peace deal brokered by France and Germany helped reduce the scope of fighting, but sporadic clashes have continued and efforts to negotiate a political settlement have stalled.During a meeting in Paris in December, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany made a deal to exchange prisoners and pledged to ensure a lasting cease-fire in fighting between Ukrainian troops and Russia-backed separatists. They made no progress, however, on key contentious issues — a timeline for local elections in eastern Ukraine and when Ukraine can get back control of its borders in the rebel-held region.Zelenskiy said on Facebook that Tuesday’s outbreak of hostilities was an attempt to derail efforts to end the conflict and said he would call a meeting of his Security Council to discuss the situation.“Our course for ending the war and our adherence to international agreements remain unchanged, just as our determination to repel any acts of aggression against Ukraine,” he said.
 
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European Union foreign ministers agreed Monday to launch a revamped mission to try to monitor and enforce an international weapons embargo on warn-torn Libya. After meeting European counterparts, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas announced naval assets would be deployed to the Mediterranean to help enforce the ban.The German foreign minister told reporters the planned EU mission was a major step toward fulfilling the EU’s commitment made in Berlin last month at an international conference to honor the routinely flouted arms embargo in a bid to stabilize the North African country.
“We all agreed to create a mission to block the entry of arms into Libya,” said Italy’s foreign minister, Luigi di Maio, after the meeting in Brussels.
The new mission is a revival of Operation Sophia, which was launched in 2015 with the dual mission of curbing human trafficking from North Africa to Europe, while also trying to enforce the U.N. arms embargo on Libya. But few observers believe the new mission will have much impact as EU naval assets will be deployed at least 100 kilometers away from the Libyan coast.The decision to circumscribe the mission to a limited geographic zone, one that easily can be circumnavigated by gunrunners, was the only way to overcome opposition to the deployment of warships by several European leaders led by Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. The Austrian leader has for weeks argued that deploying ships in the Mediterranean Sea would act as a “pull factor” for migrants trying to reach Europe from Libya.With fears mounting that Europe could see another massive influx of asylum-seekers from the Middle East and Africa — thanks to political turmoil in Lebanon and a Russian-backed offensive by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the north of his country — EU critics of a deployment off the coast of Libya said the mission would morph quickly from embargo-enforcement to rescuing migrants.EU warships would have little choice but to pick up migrants trying to make the perilous Mediterranean crossing, they said, repeating what happened to Operation Sophia, which had its naval assets stripped away last year under pressure from the populist coalition that was then in power in Rome.FILE – Italian Navy light aircraft carrier Giuseppe Garibaldi, seen from a helicopter, sails the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Sicily, part of the European Union’s naval mission Operation Sophia, Nov. 25, 2016.Operation Sophia was named after a migrant child born on a German frigate to a Somali mother in 2015. Her mother chose the name at the suggestion of the doctors who helped with the delivery.In a recent interview Kurz warned a naval mission would be “a ticket to Europe for thousands of illegal migrants.” He told Germany’s Die Welt newspaper that the vessels would inevitably encourage another migrant influx. Under international law ships — military or civilian — are obliged to rescue people in distress at sea.Libya has been a key gateway for Europe-bound migrants and asylum-seekers. France and Italy have been backing opposing sides in the long-running conflict in the country between an internationally recognized government in Tripoli, which has Rome’s support, and forces from the east of Libya commanded by the renegade general Khalifa Haftar, which are backed by Paris.According to Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn, the “maritime assets will be withdrawn” from any area should their presence attract migrants hoping to be picked up at sea. Italy’s Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said if the EU ships proved to be a “pull factor” for migrants desperate to reach Europe “the mission will be stopped.”In Berlin last month EU leaders joined other powers, including Turkey, Qatar, and Russia, in agreeing to do whatever was needed to implement the U.N. arms embargo and observe a cease-fire. They pledged to ensure their respective international allies stop supplying arms. But within hours of the agreement, which was brokered by Germany’s Angela Merkel, there were reports of the embargo being violated.Last week, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply frustrated with what’s happening in Libya.” He added: “The truth is that the Security Council embargo remains violated.”On Sunday the U.N. deputy special envoy for Libya, Stephanie Williams, described the arms embargo as a joke.FILE – German Navy sailors and Finish Special Forces surround a boat with migrants near the German combat supply ship Frankfurt am Main during the EU’s Operation Sophia, in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Libya, March 29, 2016.The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said Monday that he hopes the new mission will be in operation by the end of March. Borrell admitted negotiations over the maritime mission had been combative, but that several states have volunteered vessels. “There will be no shortage” of ships, he said.  Borrell had been highly critical of the stance of Austria’s Kurz, saying it was absurd for Austria, a landlocked country without a navy, to block the revival of Operation Sophia. But on Monday he struck a more conciliatory tone, saying that some member states had “legitimate concerns” about the “potential impact on migration flows.”He said the EU would do what it can to enforce the embargo but added “we cannot station troops along the Egyptian-Libyan border.” Egypt has been a backer of Gen. Haftar and has reportedly supplied eastern forces with artillery.Ahead of the Brussels meeting, the EU’s top general had warned that a failure to revive a military mission to enforce the arms embargo on Libya would mean the bloc had failed to live up to geopolitical ambitions. In an interview with Politico, Italian General Claudio Graziano said if Sophia wasn’t revived, it would send “an extremely negative message” and would mean the EU is “not able to find a solution.”Humanitarian organizations are criticizing the terms of the new naval mission.“Foreign policy aside, this is hugely concerning from a humanitarian and human rights perspective,” tweeted Liam Kelly, Libya country director for the Danish Refugee Council. He added: “Under International Maritime Law, every State has a duty to render assistance to persons found at sea in danger of being lost and rescue persons in distress. This proposal is exactly the opposite – to withdraw assistance if it is deemed likely to be needed.” 
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Venezuela’s decision to suspend TAP Air Portugal’s flights to Caracas is “completely unfounded and unjustified,” Portuguese Foreign Minister Augusto Santos Silva said Tuesday.”I can’t see any kind of justification” for the 90-day suspension, Santos Silva said.
Venezuelan authorities took the step Monday after TAP last week carried opposition leader Juan Guaido and his uncle home from an international tour aimed at ousting President Nicolas Maduro.
Guaido’s uncle was arrested upon landing and accused of trying to bring a small amount of explosives into Venezuela. Portugal ordered an official investigation into that allegation, and Santos Silva said it hasn’t finished yet.
The suspension is a “hostile act” against Portugal, Santos Silva told national news agency Lusa, in comments published by online newspaper Observador.
Portugal is in a coalition of European and Latin American nations, called the “International Contact Group,” that has backed Guaido against Maduro. Thousands of Portuguese immigrants live in Venezuela.
Santos Silva said the suspension would also hurt Venezuelans because the Portuguese flag carrier is one of the few international airlines still serving Caracas, with twice weekly flights.
TAP said in a statement it “meets all the legal and safety requirements demanded” by authorities in both Portugal and Venezuela. 
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The European Union has approved a trade agreement with Vietnam, disproving skeptics who thought the EU’s divorce with Britain and Vietnam human rights concerns would delay the vote.Members of the EU Parliament last week voted 401 to 192 in favor of ratifying the agreement, which would roll back almost all import tariffs between the bloc and Vietnam. The EU is looking for new economic tailwinds amid concerns with other partners: the British exit from the union threatens commerce, while U.S. President Donald Trump has turned his attention from the China trade war to issue more tariffs against the European Union this month. The vote was also welcomed as good news by Vietnam, which worries its economy will be hurt by the U.S.-China trade war and the spread of the new coronavirus.“History shows that isolation does not change a country,”  said Bernd Lange, chair of the EU Parliament trade committee and vice chair of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. “That is why Parliament voted in favor of this trade agreement with Vietnam. With it, we strengthen the role of the EU in Vietnam and the region, ensuring that our voice has more weight than before.”The EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement would be Europe’s second in Southeast Asia, after one with Singapore. Its decreased tariffs are expected to increase Vietnamese exports of seafood, textiles, and wood products to the EU, and EU exports of beverages, machinery, and drugs to Vietnam.A cobblestone street is seen in Brussels, the seat of the European Union, which Vietnam is awaiting to finalize a trade agreement. (VOA/Ha Nguyen)This is Europe’s “most ambitious trade agreement with a developing country,” said the German Business Association of Vietnam in an email.The agreement is considered ambitious because it is meant to hold parties to a higher environmental and social standard than merely decreasing tariffs for companies. Vietnam’s one-party state promised to certify that timber isn’t illegally logged before it’s exported, for instance. It also promised to allow labor unions independent of the government.However Emmanuel Maurel, a member of the European Parliament from France, doesn’t believe Vietnam will keep its promise. He also criticized the trade agreement as benefiting not the average citizen but a small fraction of companies that will find it easier to offshore jobs.“There are losers on the Vietnamese side and there are losers on the European side,” he said.Vietnam has not ratified the agreement. Its parliament meets two times a year, so its next chance to vote on the agreement will be in May.Negotiations dragged on for the agreement, which many had expected would have been finalized years ago. Delays included the 2017 inauguration of Trump, who withdrew from the Trans Pacific Partnership, another trade agreement that included Vietnam. Because Vietnam wanted to implement the TPP and the EU agreement at the same time, it postponed the latter deal until more recently.However now Vietnam has welcomed the European Union’s favorable vote this month and looks set to emulate it.“This is a meaningful result for Vietnam and the EU, two comprehensive strategic partners,” Minister of Industry and Trade Tran Tuan Anh, said.
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An adviser to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who had discussed the benefits of forced contraception quit Monday, saying “media hysteria” about his old online posts meant he had become a distraction for the government.Earlier, Johnson’s spokesman repeatedly refused to comment when asked about Andrew Sabisky, whose appointment drew widespread criticism after the Mail on Sunday newspaper reported statements made in his name online in 2014 and 2016.In addition to posts on contraception, Sabisky also said data showed the U.S. black population had lower IQ than white people, and, in a 2016 interview with digital publication Schools Week, discussed the benefits of genetic selection.Media reported Sabisky was hired following an unusual appeal earlier this year from Johnson’s senior adviser Dominic Cummings for “weirdos and misfits with odd skills” to help bring new ideas to Britain’s government.His resignation is a blow to that effort, which had attracted criticism from those who said Cummings was sidestepping normal government recruitment processes.”The media hysteria about my old stuff online is mad but I wanted to help (the government) not be a distraction,” Sabisky said on Twitter.”Accordingly I’ve decided to resign as a contractor … I signed up to do real work, not be in the middle of a giant character assassination: if I can’t do the work properly there’s no point.”Sabisky, who has referred to himself as a “super forecaster,” said he hoped Johnson’s office hired more people with “good geopolitical forecasting track records” and that the “media learn to stop selective quoting.”Both the opposition Labour Party and at least two of Johnson’s own Conservatives had called for him to be fired.”Andrew Sabisky’s presence in No.10 is a poor reflection on the government and there is no way to defend it. He needs to go. ‘Weirdos’ and ‘misfits’ are all very well, but please can they not gratuitously cause offense,” Conservative lawmaker William Wragg wrote on Twitter before Sabisky resigned.Online postsAn account in Sabisky’s name made the comments about black IQ in a reply to a 2014 blog post written by an American professor discussing education disabilities in the United States.In 2016, replying to a blog post written by Cummings, an account in Sabisky’s name said:”One way to get around the problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception at the onset of puberty. Vaccination laws give it a precedent, I would argue.”Johnson’s spokesman earlier repeatedly refused to comment on whether Johnson shared Sabisky’s views, saying only that the prime minister’s own views were well known. He would not confirm the nature of Sabisky’s role.
 
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Britain issued severe flood warnings Monday, advising of life-threatening danger after Storm Dennis dumped weeks’ worth of rain in some places. A woman was found dead after being swept away by the floodwaters, the storm’s third confirmed victim.To the east, Dennis’ gale-force winds also left nine people injured in Germany as their vehicles crashed into broken trees littering roads and train tracks. Flooding and power outages were reported elsewhere in northern Europe.By Monday evening, Britain’s Environment Agency issued seven severe flood warnings in the central English counties of Herefordshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire. Another 200 lower-level flood warnings were also in place, meaning that flooding was expected.Some 480 flood warnings and alerts were issued across England on Monday, the highest number on record, the agency said.A man uses a plank of wood to paddle a kayak on floodwater after the River Wye burst its banks in Ross-on-Wye, western England, Feb. 17, 2020, in the aftermath of Storm Dennis.The storm’s confirmed death toll rose to three as West Mercia Police said a body had been found in the search for a 55-year-old woman who had been missing near Tenbury in Worcestershire since Sunday.A man pulled from the water in the same incident was airlifted to a hospital, where he remains in stable condition, police said.’I’ve never seen anything like it’The weather system brought winds of more than 145 kph (90 mph) and up to 150 millimeters (6 inches) of rain to Britain over the weekend. And the tumult is not over.”We expect disruptive weather into the middle of this week bringing a significant flood risk for the West Midlands, and there are flood warnings in place across much of England,” said Toby Willison, Executive Director of Operations at Britain’s Environment Agency.Forecasters said river levels in parts of northern England had yet to reach their peak. In the northern England city of York, authorities were piling up more than 4,000 sandbags as the River Ouse continued to rise. It’s expected to peak Tuesday.Other residents in Wales and western England were cleaning up Monday after the storm flooded roads, railways, homes and businesses and disrupted travel across Britain. Some told stories of fleeing for their lives.People bail water out of flooded homes after the River Wye burst its banks in Ross-on-Wye, western England, Feb. 17, 2020, in the aftermath of Storm Dennis.Jeanette Cox, 68 and her daughter Rachel woke up to the sound of water in their home in the Welsh village of Nantgarw, near Cardiff, about at 4 a.m. Sunday. Cox said the only object that survived downstairs was her wedding day photograph that she had kept on a windowsill. Her husband Bill died from cancer in 2009.”It was pitch black,” she said. “All you could hear was the water running. I’ve never seen anything like it. I was very frightened.”Climate changeBritain’s environment secretary said climate change was making extreme weather events more common. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government denied it was unprepared for such storms.”We’ll never be able to protect every single household, just because of the nature of climate change and the fact that these weather events are becoming more extreme, but we’ve done everything that we can do with a significant sum of money,” Environment Secretary George Eustice said.The fish market is flooded during a storm surge in Hamburg, Germany, Feb. 17, 2020.In Germany, at least nine people were injured in weather-related car accidents as high winds brought trees down onto roads and train tracks.A commuter train with 67 passengers also crashed into a fallen tree in the western German city of Dortmund, but no one was injured. And in the German city of Hamburg, the city’s famous fish market was flooded for the second time this month.Further north, strong winds and heavy rains caused flooding, road closures and electricity outages across the Nordic and Baltic regions and forced the cancellation of several ferries between Denmark and Norway.In Denmark, the southwestern city of Kolding was flooded as gale force winds and heavy rains battered the area. In nearby Horsens, police protectively evacuated residents near Bygholm Lake out of fear that a levee would collapse.In southwestern Norway, more than half a dozen roads and several mountain passes were closed amid heavy snow and high winds.
 
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An Istanbul court is expected Tuesday to deliver a “landmark” verdict on 16 civil society activists on trial for sedition.For one of the defendants, a leading philanthropist and supporter of civil society, the case is drawing international scrutiny seen as pivotal in determining the direction of the country.  “The outcome of this case will show the rest of the world whether respect for human rights has any part to play in the Turkish justice system,” Milena Buyum, Amnesty International’s Turkey campaigner, said in a statement released Monday.FILE – Osman Kavala, April 29, 2015.Prosecutors accused the 16 defendants of supporting and organizing anti-government protests in 2013 against then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is now president.  The protests were called the Gezi movement after the park in Istanbul where they began. Prosecutors are calling for sentences of up to life in prison without parole.Among the accused is Osman Kavala, one of Turkey’s leading philanthropists and supporters of civil society, who has been jailed for more than two years.”He has been a very key linchpin figure in civil society. That is why he has been targeted, and that’s what the European court also said,” said senior Turkey researcher Emma Sinclair-Webb of Human Rights Watch.  “The European court said in December in its ruling the prolonged arbitrary detention is politically motivated and has a chilling effect on the rest of civil society,” she said.Criticism from international observers The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) called for Kavala’s immediate release and an end to the case; however, the Istanbul court refused to release him, saying the ruling was being appealed.The court had released the other 15 defendants at earlier hearings, but they all now risk being returned to jail.”The prosecutor is asking for an aggravated life sentence based on accusations that pass as evidence in the indictment and with meaningless, incoherent, unreasonable interpretations,” Yigit Aksakoglu, a child development specialist who is on trial with Kavala, said in an interview with Turkish media.FILE – Turkish soldiers stand outside the court in a prison complex where the trial of prominent philanthropist Osman Kavala and 15 others started, while people arrive, in Silivri, outside Istanbul, June 24, 2019.Aksakoglu spent seven months in solitary confinement before being released from pre-trial detention.Along with the ECHR, international observers have also sharply criticized the prosecutor’s case, claiming that no concrete evidence has been produced and that prosecutors relied mainly on the testimony of anonymous witnesses.”There is nothing there to support such allegations and charges,” said Sinclair-Webb. “It’s a very example of the misuse of the criminal law, an unfair trial with politically motivated charges.”Controversy increased further at the last hearing in January with the judge’s refusal to allow the cross-examination of prosecution witnesses.Sinan Gokcen, the Turkish representative of Swedish-based Civil Rights Defenders, claims the case is part of a broader strategy by Ankara.”Their arrests and this unlawful detention period and denial of all international procedural rights has had a huge effect on civil society. It’s direct intimidation,” Gokcen said.Conspiracy vs. popular uprisingBut Erdogan is vigorously defending the prosecution of the 16 defendants, insisting the Gezi protest was a carefully orchestrated nationwide conspiracy against his rule, organized and financed in part by Kavala and his network of supporters.  A few months before Kavala’s prosecution, Erdogan labeled Kavala a public enemy, accusing him of “financing terrorists” and being a representative of “that famous Jew (George Soros), who tries to divide and tear up nations.”FILE – Riot police fire a water cannon on Gezi Park protesters at Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey, June 15, 2013.Erdogan did not elaborate on the comments about Soros, who is an international philanthropist.Six years after the Gezi protests, Erdogan continues to portray the unrest as a conspiracy rather than a popular uprising. At its peak, Gezi spread to nearly every major city and town. Most observers say that rather than being a plot, Gezi was a grass-roots movement with no leadership and in reaction to Erdogan’s increasing authoritarianism.If Kavala and the 15 other defendants are convicted, Ankara could pay a high price. The EU has sharply criticized the case, criticism that has increased with the ECHR’s condemnation of the trial.Ankara is looking to the EU for financial support to deal with the latest refugee exodus from Syria’s Idlib province. Analysts warn that assistance could be conditional.
  
“(German Chancellor Angela) Merkel vaguely promised new aid to Turkey for Syrian refugees,” said analyst Atilla Yesilada of Global Source Partners. “But according to European Union Turkey rapporteur Nacho Sanchez Amor, if any aid is forthcoming, it will be conditional on the release of people like Osman Kavala and Selahattin Demirtas (the former leader of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish HDP).”Other analysts suggest Brussels’ priority is to appease Erdogan, ensuring the Turkish president doesn’t carry out his frequent threat to open the borders, which could potentially unleash a new wave of refugees into Europe.  For Aksakoglu, Tuesday’s verdict is a matter of life or death.”He (the prosecutor) wants me to spend my whole life without any hope of leaving the prison. This is equal to capital punishment in Turkey,” he said.
 
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“Be yourself” is the advice former British prime minister Theresa May gave to the Global Women’s Forum in Dubai on Monday, explaining how she had risen to the top job despite refusing to conform to masculine traditions in politics.”I did my politics a different way from the men,” she told the mostly female audience of her entrance to parliament in 1997.”There was still a huge emphasis on men drinking together, getting together into groups and some of the women felt they had to join that and I didn’t,” she said.”I felt I wanted to do it the way I wanted to do it so I did it my way, I was myself and hey, I became prime minister,” she said, provoking laughs from the audience.May served as Britain’s second female prime minister, after the late Margaret Thatcher, and home secretary as well as minister for women and equalities — a role that remains necessary in May’s view.She resigned as premier in July 2019 after three years in the post amid mounting pressure over her inability to carry out Brexit, a topic notably absent from her speech in the United Arab Emirates.At the end of September, during her first major public appearance since leaving Downing Street, May announced she would not rush to write her memoirs.That remains the case, said May, despite the encouragement of many people, including former foreign secretary William Hague.”He thought it was very important that people at the center of events write about them, so that historians can look at what it was like for the individuals involved,” she said.”So maybe, maybe one day, but I am not doing it at the moment,” she added.She advised the women in the audience to persevere in the face of failure and highlighted the causes she continues working on, including domestic violence, modern slavery and mental health.   
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Facebook warned of threats to innovation and freedom of expression on Monday, ahead of the release of a raft of rules by the European Union this week and in coming months to rein in U.S. tech giants and Chinese companies.The social media giant laid out its concerns in a white paper, and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg was expected to reiterate the message to EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager and EU industry chief Thierry Breton in Brussels on Monday.Referring to the possibility that the EU may hold internet companies responsible for hate speech and other illegal speech published on their platforms, Facebook said this ignores the nature of the internet.”Such liability would stifle innovation as well as individuals’ freedom of expression,” it said in the white paper.It suggested new frameworks that should be proportionate and necessary.Zuckerberg’s visit came on the heels of visits by Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and Microsoft President Brad Smith to Brussels last month.Vestager and Breton will announce proposals on Wednesday aimed at exploiting the bloc’s treasure trove of industrial data and challenging the dominance of Facebook, Google and Amazon.They will also propose rules to govern the use of artificial intelligence especially in high risk sectors such as healthcare and transport. 
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Russia said on Friday that plans by the United States to deploy weapons in space would deal an irreversible blow to the current security balance in space, the RIA news agency cited the foreign ministry as saying.Russia does not have plans to solve problems in space using weapons, the foreign ministry added. 
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The cardinal’s response was not what Yolanda Martinez  had expected — or could abide.Her son had been sexually abused by a priest of the Legion of Christ, a disgraced religious order. And now she was calling Cardinal Valasio De Paolis — the Vatican official appointed by the pope to lead the Legion and to clean it up — to report the settlement the group was offering, and to express her outrage.
The terms: Martinez’s  family would receive 15,000 euros ($16,300) from the order. But in return, her son would have to recant the testimony he gave to Milan prosecutors that the priest had repeatedly assaulted him when he was a 12-year-old student at the order’s youth seminary in northern Italy. He would have to lie.
The cardinal did not seem shocked. He did not share her indignation.
Instead, he chuckled. He said she shouldn’t sign the deal, but should try to work out another agreement without attorneys: “Lawyers complicate things. Even Scripture says that among Christians we should find agreement.”
The conversation between the aggrieved mother and Pope Benedict XVI’s personal envoy was wiretapped. The tape — as well as the six-page settlement proposal — are key pieces of evidence in a criminal trial opening next month in Milan. Prosecutors allege that Legion lawyers and priests tried to obstruct justice, and extort Martinez’s  family by offering them money to recant testimony to prosecutors in hopes of quashing a criminal investigation into the abusive priest, Vladimir Resendiz Gutierrez.Lawyers for the five suspects declined to comment. The Legion says they have professed innocence. A spokesman said that at the time, the Legion didn’t have in place the uniform child protection policies and guidelines that are now mandatory across the order.
De Paolis is beyond earthly justice — he died in 2017 and there is no evidence he knew of, or approved, the settlement offer before it was made. But the tape and documents seized when police raided the Legion’s headquarters in 2014 show that he had turned a blind eye to superiors who protected pedophiles.
In addition, the evidence shows that when De Paolis first learned about Resendiz’s  crimes in 2011, he approved an in-house canonical investigation but didn’t report the priest to police. And when he learned two years later that other Legion priests were apparently trying to impede the criminal investigation into his crimes, the pope’s delegate didn’t report that either.
And a few hours after he spoke with Martinez, De Paolis opened the Legion’s 2014 assembly where he formally ended the mandate given to him by Benedict to reform and purify the religious order. The Legion had been “cured and cleaned,” he said.
In fact, his mission hadn’t really been accomplished. ___
Benedict had entrusted De Paolis, one of the Vatican’s most respected canon lawyers, to turn the Legion around in 2010, after revelations that its founder, the late Rev. Marcial Maciel, had raped his seminarians, fathered three children and built a cult-like order to hide his crimes.
There had been calls for the Vatican to suppress the Legion. But Benedict decided against it, apparently determining in part that the order was too big and too rich to fail. Instead, he opted for a process of reform, giving De Paolis the broadest possible powers to rebuild the Legion from the ground up and saying it must undergo a profound process of “purification” and “renewal.”
But De Paolis refused from the start to remove any of Maciel’s old guard, who remain in power today. He refused to investigate the cover-up of Maciel’s crimes. He refused to reopen old allegations of abuse by other priests, even when serial rapists remained in the Legion’s ranks, unpunished.
More generally, he did not come to grips with the order’s deep-seated culture of sexual abuse, cover-up and secrecy — and its long record of avoiding law enforcement and dismissing, discrediting and silencing victims. As a result, even onetime Legion supporters now openly question his reform, which was dismissed as ineffective by the Legion’s longtime critics.
“They always try to control victims, minimize them, defame them, accuse them of exaggerating things,” said Alberto Athie, a former Mexican priest who has campaigned for more than 20 years on behalf of clergy sexual abuse victims, including victims of the Legion.
“Then, if they don’t achieve that level of control, they go to the next level, looking for their parents, trying to minimize them or buy them off, silence them. And if that doesn’t work, they go to trial and try to do what they can to win the case,” he said.
Now, victims of these other Legion priests are coming forward in droves with stories of sexual, psychological and spiritual abuse, and how the Legion’s culture of secrecy and cover-up has remained intact.
“They say they’re close to the victims and help their families,” Martinez  told The Associated Press at her home in Milan. “My testimony is this didn’t happen.”___
Martinez, a 54-year-old mother of three, chokes up when she recalls the day she received the phone call from her son’s psychologist. It was March of 2013, and her eldest son had been receiving therapy on the advice of his high school girlfriend. Martinez  thought she was about to learn that she would be a grandmother; she thought her boy had gotten the girl pregnant.
Instead, Dr. Gian Piero Guidetti told Martinez  and her husband that during therapy, their son had revealed that he had been repeatedly sexually molested by Resendiz  starting in 2008, when he was a middle schooler at the Legion’s youth seminary in Gozzano, near Italy’s border with Switzerland. Guidetti, himself a priest, told them he was required by his medical profession to report the crime to prosecutors.
His complaint, and the testimony of Martinez’s  son, sparked a criminal investigation that resulted in Resendiz’s  2019 conviction, which was upheld on appeal in January. Resendiz, 43, who was convicted in absentia and is believed to be living in his native Mexico, has until the end of March to appeal the conviction and 6 1/2-year prison sentence to Italy’s highest court. (Efforts by The Associated Press to reach his lawyer were unsuccessful.)
The investigation, however, netted evidence that went far beyond Resendiz’s  own wrongdoing. Documents seized by police and seen by AP in the court file showed a pattern of cover-up by the Legion and the pope’s envoy that stretched from Milan to Mexico, the Vatican to Venezuela and points in between.
Personnel files, for example, made clear Resendiz was known to the Legion as a risk even when he was a teenage seminarian in the 1990s, yet he was ordained a priest anyway in 2006 and immediately sent to oversee young boys at the Gozzano youth seminary.
“He’s a boy with strong sexual impulses and low capacity to control them,” Resendiz’s  novice director, the Rev. Antonio Leon  Santacruz, wrote in an internal assessment on Jan. 9, 1994. “Given his psychological character, he’s inclined to not respect rules without great difficulty and the psychologist thinks it will be difficult for him to undertake consecrated life given he has little respect for rules. He follows them as long as he’s being watched, but as soon as he can, he breaks them and has no remorse.”
A year later, on Resendiz’s  19th birthday, the seminarian wrote a letter to Maciel — addressing it as all Legionaries addressed the man they regarded as a living saint: “Nuestro Padre,” “Our Father.”
“I’m having various problems in the field of purity and the truth is I’m having a hard time, because temptations are coming to me,” he wrote. “I’m praying to the Holy Virgin every day for grace and asking her for strength to not offend again; I say again because I have had the disgrace of falling, but with the help of God I will fight to form that pure, priestly heart.”
When Martinez  saw such letters in the court file, her heart fell.
“My son wasn’t even born yet, she said. “How can you put someone like that in charge of a seminary?”
A Legion spokesman, the Rev. Aaron Smith, said the Legion has overhauled its training process for seminarians since Resendiz’s  era, applying more scrutiny before ordination.
“Things are different today,” he said in emailed response to questions.___
      
While Milan prosecutors first heard about Resendiz’s  pedophilia in March 2013 when the therapist reported it, the crimes were old news to both the Vatican and the Legion.
The Legion has admitted it received a first report of abuse by Resendiz on March 6, 2011, from another boy who had been a student at Gozzano. The Legion says that boy, an Austrian, had first told a Legion priest of Resendiz’s  abuse. That priest recommended he report it to a church ombudsman’s office in Austria that receives abuse complaints, which he did, Smith said.
Separately, the Legion got wind of another possible victim in Venezuela, where Resendiz  had been sent from Gozzano in 2008, after he abused Martinez’s  son.
Italian police were never informed by the Legion or the Vatican. Neither the Vatican nor Italy requires clergy to report suspected child sex abuse.
When police finally did get wind of the case in March 2013, they uncovered elaborate efforts to keep Resendiz’s  crimes quiet. According to one email seized by Italian police — written March 16, 2011, or 10 days after the Austrian claim was first received by the order — a Legion lawyer recommended to one of the Legion’s most powerful behind-the-scenes superiors, the Rev. Gabriel Sotres, that a Legion priest visit with the victim in Austria.
The aim of the visit, prosecutors wrote in summarizing the email exchanges, “was to speak to the [victim’s] older brother and convince him to not tell their parents and not go to police because this could cause serious problems not only for the Legion but also Father Vladimir, all the other priests involved and the victim and his family.”
Smith, the Legion spokesman, didn’t deny the prosecutors’ account but said that “encouraging a child to keep something from their parents or guardians is contrary to our code of conduct.”
Later in 2011, the Legion arranged for Resendiz  to be transferred from Venezuela to Colombia, and prepared a legal strategy to limit the possible damage if the Venezuelan case escalated. The emails were sent to several Legion leaders, including Sotres, who remain in top positions today. In fact, in the Legion’s current leadership assembly under way in Rome to choose new superiors and priorities, at least 13 of the 89 priests were involved in some way in dealing with the Resendiz  scandal, fallout and cover-up, including two priests who are defendants in the upcoming Milan trial.
According to the seized emails, the plan proposed by a Legion lawyer involved reporting only Resendiz’s  name to Venezuelan police to comply with local reporting laws, leaving out that he was a priest, that he was accused of a sex crime against a child, and the name of the Legion, prosecutors said in summarizing the emails. The report would also note that he no longer lived in Venezuela.
The Legion has said Resendiz  was removed from priestly ministry and from his work with young people in Venezuela within days of receiving the initial Austrian report.
But the emails seized indicate that the restrictions weren’t necessarily enforced: One from Dec. 20, 2012, suggests that Resendiz was hearing confessions in schools and celebrating Mass in Colombia, news that prompted the leadership to ultimately recommend he be sent for psychological counseling in Mexico and later assigned to an administrative position “where they don’t know his situation.”
Eventually, as part of the church’s in-house investigation, Resendiz  confessed — but only to the Legion and Vatican authorities, and only about other boys he abused, not Martinez’s  son.
“I sincerely recognize my terrible behavior as a priest,” he wrote the Vatican official in charge of the sex crimes office in 2012, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller.
“Truly I lived in hell when these sad facts occurred. I recognize the gravity of the acts that I committed and I humbly ask the church for forgiveness for these sad and painful facts. I can’t understand how it could have happened, and I recognize that I lacked the courage to admit to the problem and advise my superiors of the danger.”
The Vatican defrocked him on April 5, 2013 — just a few weeks after Italian prosecutors first heard about Martinez’s  son.
By October of that year, the Legion was nearing the end of De Paolis’ mandate and clearly wanted to avoid the possibility that the Resendiz  case could explode publicly and jeopardize the plan to resume their independence from the Vatican.
Martinez  and her family, for their part, were coping with the trauma of her son’s abuse.
“He would have nightmares. He wouldn’t let me touch him …,” Martinez  said. “He couldn’t stand anyone being close to him.”
Once, he was even prevented from throwing himself in front of a subway train.
Martinez  had been in regular touch with the Legion priest closest to the family, the Rev. Luca Gallizia, her husband’s spiritual director. He was serving as the family’s contact with the Legion, after all other priests and members of Martinez’s  Regnum Christi social circle severed contact — apparently on orders from the leadership.
Gallizia traveled to Milan to meet with Martinez  on Oct. 18, 2013, bringing a proposed settlement to compensate the family. They met in a room off the parish playground of the Sant’Eustorgio basilica where Martinez  worked.
When Martinez  read it later that night with her husband, she was shocked.
“It was a second violation, because for all intents and purposes in that letter, they asked us to deny the facts. And for us it was a stab in the back because it was brought to us by our spiritual father. … He knew everything about us, because my husband confided in him. And that made it even more painful.”
The Legion declined to comment on the proposed settlement, citing the upcoming trial.
The document the Legion wanted Martinez’s family to sign states that her son ruled out having been sexually abused by Resendiz and regardless didn’t remember. It said he denied having any phone or text message contact with him, and that his ensuing problems were due to the fact that he left the seminary and was having trouble integrating socially into his new public high school.
The document set out payments for the son’s continuing education and therapy and required “absolute” secrecy. If the family were called to testify, they were to make the same declarations as contained in the settlement — denying the abuse.
A few months later, the Legion realized it had erred in leaving the proposal with Martinez  and proposed a revised settlement acknowledging the abuse occurred. Now, though, it required the family to pay back double the 15,000 euro ($16,300) settlement offer if they violated the confidentiality agreement.
It was then that Martinez  called De Paolis.
“Both my lawyer and I, our jaws dropped,” she told the Vatican cardinal. The pope’s envoy said he was surprised as well.
“Yes, but this, this is how it’s done in Italy,” he said.
The mother would have none of it. “It’s not a very nice agreement, signing a lie,” Martinez  told the cardinal. “Aside from the fact that I don’t want any money, I’m not signing the letter.” 
 
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The United States and Europe appear divided over the health of the transatlantic relationship following a key security conference in Germany over the weekend, attended by hundreds of political and military leaders. Eruopeans accused Washington of ‘rejecting the idea of an international community’ – but the U.S. said the alliance is in good shape. As Henry Ridgwell reports from the Munich conference, there is an emerging disagreement between Western allies over what exactly represents the biggest threat to Western democracy
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Storm Dennis roared across Britain with high winds and heavy rains Sunday, prompting authorities to issue a record number of flood warnings and alerts for England and a rare “red warning” for extremely life-threatening flooding in Wales.
The Met Office, Britain’s meteorological service, only issues its highest red warning when it thinks the weather will be so dangerous there’s a “risk to life” and that people must take immediate action to protect themselves. It was the first time a red warning has been sounded since December 2015.
Four hours later, the south Wales alert was downgraded to “amber,” which still warns of significant impact from the weather and a “potential risk to life.” The Met Office also had four other amber warnings in place in England and Wales following the torrential downpours.
Wales appeared to be bearing the brunt of the two-day storm after a month’s rain fell in the space of 48 hours. South Wales Police declared a “major incident” following multiple floods, landslides and evacuations. And Gwent Police said residents of Skenfrith, Monmouthshire, were being advised to evacuate due to the flooding.
The Met Office said the highest wind gust recorded was 91 mph (146 kph) at Aberdaron in north Wales on Saturday. It also said a total of 157.6 mm (6.1 inches) of rain fell at Crai Reservoir in the Welsh county of Powys over 48 hours to Sunday morning.The River Taff burst its banks in the Welsh town of Pontypool and severe flood warning have been issued for the River Neath in south Wales and the River Teme further north.As the wet and windy weather started to clear across parts of the south, the number of flood warnings across the U.K. declined but there were still around 350 of them in place Sunday, from the north of Scotland through to Cornwall in southwest England.John Curtin, the executive director of flood and coastal risk management at the Environment Agency, said in a tweet that at one point during the day, England had the most flood warnings and lower-level alerts in force — 594 — than on any other day on record.
The local authority in Herefordshire, an English county that borders central Wales, declared a “major incident” amid widespread flooding and said it was focusing on making sure “vulnerable residents are evacuated.” West Mercia Police, also declared a “major incident” for Shropshire, another county in central England that borders Wales.
Flood warnings could remain in place for a while since much of Britain is still saturated from last week’s Storm Ciara, which left eight people dead across Europe.
“Whilst the heaviest rain has cleared from Northern Ireland and Scotland, England and Wales will continue to see heavy rain on Sunday, with a risk of severe flooding in places,” said Andy Page, the Met Office’s chief meteorologist.
The fourth named storm of Europe’s winter season has already been blamed for the deaths of two men who were pulled Saturday from the sea in separate searches off England’s southeastern coast.Hundreds of flights were cancelled due to the high winds while train services were repeatedly disrupted by flooding, affecting tens of thousands of passengers as British families leave for the mid-winter school break.On Saturday, around 75 British army personnel and 70 reservists helped out communities in the flood-hit Calder Valley region in West Yorkshire, constructing flood barriers and repairing damaged flood defenses.    I
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The United States and Europe appear deeply divided over the health of the transatlantic relationship following a key security conference in Germany over the weekend, attended by hundreds of political and military leaders from around the world.German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier opened the conference with a speech that accused Washington of ‘rejecting the idea of an international community’ – and warned of growing threats from Russia and China.U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, center, shakes hands with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, right, as US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper watches during the 56th Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, Feb. 14, 2020.The U.S delegation, headed by U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, rejected claims of a transatlantic rift. “Those statements do simply not fact in any significant way or reflect reality,” Sexretary of State Pompeo told the conference Saturday. “I am happy to report that the death of the transatlantic alliance is grossly over exaggerated. The West is winning. We are collectively winning. We are doing it together.”For proof, Pompeo said Europe should look to the tens of thousands of U.S. troops defending NATO’s border with Russia, and America’s lead role in defeating Islamic State.Secretary Pompeo also pledged $1 billion to help eastern European countries end their dependence on Russian gas, with the aim of boosting U.S. liquified natural gas exports.For Europe, the diagnosis appears very different. French president Emmanuel Macron said the U.S. was undergoing ‘a rethink of its relationship with Europe’ – and the continent must take charge of its own destiny. “When I look at the world as it is being shaped, and that is the theme of your conference this year, there is indeed a weakening of the West,” Macron said. “Fifteen years ago, we thought that our values were universal, that we were going to dominate the world in the long term, that we were dominant in terms of technology, military and so on, and then I look at the horizon of 10-15 years, we are going to be increasingly pushed by other agendas and other values, they are emerging.”Macron added that it was time to have a ‘strategic dialogue’ with Russia. Moscow’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov told the conference it was time to ‘abandon the cultivation of the phantom Russian threat.’ Many other European nations cited Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine as evidence of the very real dangers.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks on the second day of the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, Feb. 15, 2020.This year’s focus on cyber security saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg take the stage, amid widespread accusations that social media platforms are facilitating states like Russia and China to interfere in Western democracy.“We were slow to understand the kind of information and operations that Russia and others were running online,” admitted Zuckerberg, before defending his record. “We take down now more than a million fake accounts a day across our network… We will continue doing our best, we are going to build up the muscle to do it, to basically find stuff as proactively as possible, we will try to draw the lines in the right places.”Conference organizers hailed diplomatic progress in other areas, including a public meeting between the presidents of rivals Azerbaijan and Armenia.There were high level meetings on Libya and Syria – with little tangible progress.The theme of the conference was meant to be ‘Westlessness’, defined by its protagonists as the purported decline of Western democracy. The U.S. delegation flatly dismissed those concerns, insisting the West has never been in better health.They left the conference with a clear message: China is adversary number one – and European allies should wake up to the threat.
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Storm Dennis roared across Britain Sunday, lashing towns and cities with high winds and dumping so much rain that authorities urged residents to protect themselves from “life-threatening floods” in Wales and Scotland.The Met Office, Britain’s national weather service, issued more than 250 flood warnings for England, Scotland and Wales.As the winds churned up enormous waves in the North Atlantic and the North Sea, the bodies of two men were pulled from the water Saturday in two separate searches off England’s eastern coast.Severe flood warnings were issued for the River Neath in south Wales and local media reported the River Taff had burst its banks in the Welsh town of Pontypool.In one 24-hour period, Tredegar in southeast Wales was hit by 105 mm (4.1 inches) of rain, while coastal Welsh village of Aberdaron was blasted by hurricane-force winds up to 91 mph (146 kph).Hundreds of flights were canceled because of the high winds while train services were repeatedly disrupted by flooding. The travel chaos affected tens of thousands of passengers on a key weekend for British families as schools closed for the midwinter break.On Saturday, around 75 British army personnel and 70 reservists helped out communities in the flood-hit Calder Valley region in West Yorkshire, constructing flood barriers and repairing damaged flood defenses.
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A surprisingly simple idea to help homeless people has gone viral – and is spreading around the world. The ‘Take One, Leave One’ concept aims to offer warm clothing to the homeless. As Henry Ridgwell reports, the idea seems to have originated in Mexico, before spreading to the United States, and now to London and across Europe – with social media key in stimulating grassroots goodwill to tackle a growing problem.
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With Colombian military snipers in position, Howard Buffett descends from a helicopter and trudges through the wet grass in steel-toed boots chewed through by his dog’s teeth. Waiting under a tin-roofed shack is a small group of coca farmers. They’ve never heard of multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett, but after decades of neglect by their own government they’re grateful for the outstretched hand of his eldest son, whom they refer to simply as “the gringo.” “There’s a saying here: The less you know, the better,” said Ruben Morantes, his leathery skin and calloused hands a testament to a lifetime of tillage in one of Colombia’s most dangerous territories, where outsiders are traditionally mistrusted. For nearly two decades Buffett has crisscrossed the world, giving away part of his father’s fortune to promote food security, conflict mitigation and public safety. But his latest gamble is one of the most daunting yet: helping Colombia kick its cocaine curse. He is focusing on Tibu, heart of the remote, notoriously lawless Catatumbo region bordering Venezuela where Buffett accompanied President Ivan Duque. Tibu has the second-largest coca crop in all of Colombia — 28,200 acres (11,400 hectares), according to the United Nations. Drug production and violence have skyrocketed in the area since armed groups filled the void left by retreating rebels who signed a peace deal with the government in 2016. Foundation’s plansThe Howard G. Buffett Foundation has committed to spending $200 million over the next few years to transform the impoverished municipality into a model of comprehensive state building. Plans include strengthening security forces and helping farmers to secure land titles and substitute coca — the raw material for cocaine — with licit crops like cacao. Howard Buffett plants a cocoa plant at a farm in La Gabarra, Colombia, Jan. 29, 2020. Buffett began working in Colombia in 2008, helping pop star Shakira set up schools in her hometown of Barranquilla.The first component is building 300 kilometers (185 miles) of roads to connect the municipality’s 37,000 residents for the first time with national and international markets. It’s a challenge made more difficult by lurking guerrillas who last year detonated a homemade bomb as army engineers were working on the road, killing five people and injuring several others. “The only way we have confidence that farmers can grow legal crops is if they can get those crops to market,” Buffett told farmers during a visit last month with Duque to La Gabarra, a rural outpost in Tibu. It was the first time any Colombian president had visited the blood-soaked hamlet. The plan envisions providing subsidies and training for farmers as they switch crops, as well as helping them find buyers. It also aims to strengthen infrastructure for local law enforcement. But some experts worry that Buffett’s enthusiasm for speeding Colombia’s development is no match for entrenched corruption in rural areas run like political fiefdoms. There’s also the challenge posed by thousands of Venezuelan migrants who lack roots in the community and are being targeted for recruitment by criminal gangs. A lot is riding on Buffett’s investment. Not since the start of the U.S.-led Plan Colombia two decades ago have so many resources converged on a single geographical area, said Alvaro Balcazar, who helped the government negotiate with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia the section of the peace deal focusing on illicit crops. “There’s no precedent for something on such large a scale,” Balcazar said. “But the region is strategic for consolidating peace in Colombia.” Son’s pursuitsLike his father, Buffett, 65, has a reputation for folksy, Midwestern plain speech and self-effacing humor. Although he’s a three-time college dropout, his father wants him to succeed him as the non-executive chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the $550 billion conglomerate that owns companies such as Duracell, Dairy Queen and GEICO insurance as well as major stakes in leading U.S. airlines and banks. But he’s spent much of his adult life roving the world, taking wildlife photos and writing books. He’s also a corn farmer and made headlines in 2017 by briefly serving as the sheriff of Macon County, Illinois, where he lives and his foundation is based. He began exploring the world as a teenager on a trip to Soviet-controlled Prague in 1969 to visit one of the many exchange students his mother hosted at their home in Omaha, Nebraska.  As a philanthropist, his priority now is helping Colombia and El Salvador, whose fight against drug trafficking directly affects the U.S. Between the two countries he has already spent or committed $310 million, including the funding in El Salvador of a new police forensics center and a modern system to help the country’s prosecutors track criminal investigations. As a volunteer police officer who logged 678 hours on patrol last year, Buffett has seen firsthand the human toll caused by drug addiction. A few weeks before traveling to Colombia, he and a partner were staking out a motel in Decatur, Illinois, at 1 a.m. when they arrested a man possessing crack. With him was a woman who said she had a drug problem, so Buffett paid for her to stay at the hotel two nights. Later, he referred her to a county rehab facility paid for with a gift from the Buffett Foundation in the hope she would get help. “These are people who need our help,” he said. “They’re not criminals.” Colombia’s President Ivan Duque, left, and Howard Buffett laugh during a tour of a cocoa farm in La Gabarra, Colombia. The Howard G. Buffett Foundation has committed to spending $200 million over the next few years to develop the municipality.He has turned to Latin America after years of focusing much of his attention on Africa and especially Rwanda, where he works with the government on sustainable agriculture. He spent so much time at his farm in South Africa in the 1990s that he obtained permanent residency. Worked with ShakiraBuffett began working in Colombia in 2008, helping pop star Shakira set up schools in her hometown of Barranquilla. He’s also funded an army unit removing thousands of landmines strewn across former conflict zones. Leveraging his business contacts, he established a program to help around 100 families in southern Colombia switch from growing coca to producing high-quality coffee for Nespresso. While an enthusiastic supporter of the 2016 peace deal, he has nonetheless struck a close relationship with Duque, a law-and-order conservative who rode into office attacking the agreement. Duque has vowed to slash cocaine production in half by the end of 2023. Production of the drug skyrocketed after his predecessor — Nobel Peace Prize laureate Juan Manuel Santos — halted aerial eradication in 2015 because of health concerns related to the herbicides used. But reaching that goal requires huge resources the government doesn’t have, as well as overcoming the indifference of urban voters who are removed from the conflict and have their own growing list of demands. That’s where Buffett steps in. The $200 million Buffett has pledged for Tibu is more than triple what the government has spent the past two years altogether on public works in 170 high-risk municipalities that are part of a rural development rescue plan mandated by the peace deal. The U.S. Agency for International Development spends $230 million annually in Colombia, although its projects are spread across the country. Beyond the big check, longtime partners praise the Buffett Foundation for being independent and nimble. It’s funded from an annual gift in Berkshire Hathaway stock by Warren Buffett, so it can take risks few are willing to attempt, development experts say. “We’re accountable mainly to the IRS [Internal Revenue Service],” joked Buffett, who sees setbacks like a venture capitalist who must eat crow before finding wild success. “If you’re a charity, and you’re going to have your annual banquet to raise a lot of money, you can’t stand up there and tell people how you had these five failures and this one success. People aren’t going to write checks,” he said. “We’ll make a decision in five minutes if we know what we want to do.” Howard Buffett, left, talks to Colombia’s President Ivan Duque aboard an air force plane before departing from Bogota, Colombia, Jan. 29, 2020. Duque has vowed to slash cocaine production in half by the end of 2023.He is skeptical of the U.S. government and United Nations, preferring not to work with either. “The reason is because we can’t depend on them,” said Buffett, who said he was burned badly by USAID in 2011 when it abandoned a joint $10 million seed program for starving farmers in South Sudan just as fighting broke out in the world’s newest independent state. “The bullets started flying and they pulled out. But it’s like, you’re in South Sudan, so of course bullets are going to fly,” he said. Partners who produceInstead, the foundation relies on partners known for delivering results quickly with slim overhead — a combination he says is hard to find among the “beltway bandits” profiting from U.S. foreign aid outlays. One accompanying him to Catatumbo is Portland, Oregon-based Mercy Corps, which is helping farmers sort through Colombia’s bureaucratic maze to obtain land titles. In a nod to his father’s reputation for common sense, Buffett seeks frequent counsel from the so-called “Oracle of Omaha.” “He’s my sounding board, kind of like my conscience in a way,” Buffett said. “But he never asks, Why are you doing that?' orWhy you’re taking that risk?’ ” In Tibu, after cracking a few jokes and planting a cacao tree, he seemed beside himself with joy even as the presidential committee hustled to quickly depart as heavy fog threatened to maroon them in the middle of nowhere. “I know Emilio is very worried about leaving,” Buffett told the farmers through a translator, referring to Duque’s post-conflict adviser, Emilio Archila. “But I’m not, because there’s lots of chocolate here.” 
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