A London court ruled Thursday that the ruler of Dubai had instilled fear in his estranged wife and had choreographed the kidnapping of their two young daughters.At the end of 2018, Britain’s High Court said, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, 70, began a campaign of intimidation against his ex-wife, Princess Haya, 45, daughter of late King Hussein of Jordan. The princess had become the sheikh’s second official wife and bore him two daughters, Jalila, 12, and Zayed, 8.In April 2019, Princess Haya escaped with her children to Britain, fearing her husband’s threats. High Court of London Judge Andrew McFarlane said the sheikh’s actions were meant “to threaten, intimidate, mistreat and oppress with a total disregard for the rule of law.”By May 2019, Princess Haya had requested that her daughters be made wards of the British court in order to deflect the legal actions Sheikh Mohammed was conducting to try to get the children returned to him in Dubai. He eventually dropped his legal bid to stop the court from issuing Princess Haya a fact-finding judgment.Though Princess Haya is Sheikh Mohammed’s second wife, the sheikh has had multiple unofficial marriages and a total of 25 children.Another daughter, Latifa, 35, tried to escape her father twice, in June 2002 and February 2018. Both times, she was forcibly brought back to Dubai and her father’s custody to be held prisoner.“[Shamsa] has been deprived of her liberty for much if not all of the past two decades,” McFarlane said regarding another one of Sheikh Mohammed’s daughters, who was abducted from Cambridge at age 19. She is now 38 and no investigation has been approved to look into her disappearance.
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The United States is accusing Russia of opening up its entire disinformation playbook to prey on growing fears about the spread of the coronavirus.Moscow’s effort, underway for weeks, according to officials, includes the use of state-run media outlets, fake news websites and “swarms” of fake online personas to churn out fabricated information in at least five languages.  “We’ve been watching the narratives that are being pushed out — false narratives around coronavirus,” Lea Gabrielle, coordinator for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), told lawmakers Thursday. “We saw the entire ecosystem of Russian disinformation at play.”Gabrielle declined to go into detail about the Russian disinformation efforts, saying she did not want to risk giving them any credence.Bill Gates?But other officials have said the Russian disinformation operation centers on three narratives — that the coronavirus is actually a bioweapon; that the CIA created the virus to hurt China; and that the virus is somehow the brainchild of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.Multiple requests to the Russian Embassy in Washington for comment went unanswered. But Russia has repeatedly denied other U.S. allegations regarding disinformation campaigns, such as charges Moscow has repeatedly sought to meddle in U.S. elections.Gabrielle said the GEC has been working with the State Department’s public diplomacy wing to try to expose and counter Moscow’s efforts, but cautioned it has not been easy.“There’s a lot of disinformation,” she told lawmakers. “It’s not just about the individual platforms. It’s the overall, big picture that we’re seeing develop and how adversaries are using the social media landscape. … I hope that all actors will act in the most responsible manner to support people who are scared around the world in the midst of this crisis.”Social media companies don’t agreeMaking the situation more challenging, some social media companies say they have yet to find evidence on their own of a massive Russian coronavirus influence operation.”At present, we’re not seeing significant coordinated platform manipulation efforts,” Twitter posted in a blog Wednesday. “However, we will remain vigilant and have invested substantially in our proactive abilities.”When contacted by VOA, Twitter confirmed it had been in contact with the GEC and has now been briefed, in broad strokes, on the center’s findings.Queries to Facebook went unanswered.As for the Kremlin’s coronavirus campaign, U.S. officials believe Russia is getting what it wants.”The fact is that many audiences around the world do believe these lies,” Jani Vujica, the GEC’s  director of analytics and research, told an audience in Washington last month about the coronavirus crisis. “For some, it reinforces their views of the West. For others, it shapes these views.”
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As the coronavirus continues to spread in Europe, extraordinary measures are being put into place on the continent.Organizers of the London Book Fair, one of the publishing industry’s biggest gatherings, have canceled the event. Airlines have also significantly cut back on flights.In Italy, where the number of deaths from coronavirus is second only to China, the government has closed all schools and universities until mid-March and barred all sporting events with fans for the next month. Cases of coronavirus worldwide continue to increase, with the flu-like illness now having reached 80 nations. The fast spread of the virus is forcing authorities in many countries to take drastic measures. Health Secretary Matt Hancock walks past a hand washing station as he leaves after talking about coronavirus at the annual conference of the British Chambers of Commerce in London, March 5, 2020.In Britain, the number of cases has spiked to 90 but so far the authorities, fearful of hurting the economy, have not yet introduced measures to restrict movement or cancel large gatherings.Some events, however are being canceled, such as the London Book Fair, which was scheduled to be held next week. The gathering normally brings together some 25,000 writers, publishers and agents. British Health Minister Matt Hancock Thursday warned of tough weeks ahead in efforts to battle the spread of the virus.  His comments came after British regional airline Flybe collapsed in the wake of the outbreak, which dealt its final blow to the already ailing carrier. Other airlines in Europe are also struggling and having to ground some of their flights.People walk by the Colosseum in Rome, March 5, 2020. Italy has closed all schools and universities and barred fans from all sporting events for the next few weeks.In Italy, the European country worst hit by COVID-19, with the death toll in excess of 148 and the number of cases surpassing 3,850, Italian Education Minister Lucia Azzolina on Wednesday made an announcement few were expecting.She said that with the fast-changing epidemiological situation, the government had decided to close all schools and universities starting on Thursday until March 15.Minister Azzolina added that she was well aware it was “a decision with an impact.” She said that as education minister, she obviously wanted students back in school as soon as possible.Some students celebrated the idea of not going to school for a while even though the education minister made clear all efforts would be made by schools and universities to ensure students continue their studies at home and not fall behind.Eighteen-year-old Riccardo Romano, who attends the Righi Liceum in Rome, expressed concern about the government decision.The closure of schools, Romano said, was the right thing to do to limit the spread of the virus. But he said the government should also have closed discos and stopped bus travel because people are near each other also in these places and risk contracting the virus. He said students are not the ones who are most at risk.The elderly are more of a concern and the Italian government has asked them to stay indoors as much as possible. It also advised everyone to keep at a safe distance of at least one meter from others, and refrain from kissing or hugging each other and shaking hands.  In addition, sporting events, including soccer games, will be played behind closed doors for the next month.  
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Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Thursday agreed to a cease-fire in northwestern Syria, following talks in Moscow on easing tensions in the region.The two leaders said the cease-fire would take effect at midnight local time in the area of Idlib, where a Syrian and Russian offensive has driven more than one million civilians toward the Turkish border over the past three months. Idlib is the last remaining rebel stronghold.in Syria.“I express hope that these agreements will serve as a good basis for a cessation of military activity in the Idlib de-escalation zone (and) stop the suffering of the peaceful population and the growing humanitarian crisis,” Putin said.Erdogan said they would “work together to supply aid for the Syrians in need” and said he reserved the right “to respond to all (Syrian) regime attacks in the field.”The offensive has triggered what may be the world’s worst-ever humanitarian crisis, the United Nations has said.Putin and Erdogan back opposing sides in the nine-year war, with Erdogan backing some Syrian rebel groups and Putin supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.Russia and Turkey have previously reached multiple cease-fire agreements in Idlib but none has been successful.The two leaders also agreed to secure a key highway in the Idlib area with joint patrols beginning next week.The announcement comes days after Erdogan said he would open his borders to western Europe. Since then, migrants have massed at the Turkish-Greek border, leading to clashes with Greek police. Turkey hosts more than 3.5 million people from Syria. 
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Four years after Russia-linked groups stoked divisions in the U.S. presidential election on social media platforms, a new report shows that Moscow’s campaign hasn’t let up and has become harder to detect.
The report  from University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Young Mie Kim found that Russia-linked social media accounts are posting about the same divisive issues — race relations, gun laws and immigration — as they did in 2016, when the Kremlin polluted American voters’ feeds with messages about the presidential election.
Since then, however, the Russians have grown better at imitating U.S. campaigns and political fan pages online, said Kim, who analyzed thousands of posts. She studied more than 5 million Facebook ads during the 2016 election, identifying Russia’s fingerprints on some of the messages through an ad-tracking app installed on volunteers’ computers. Her review is co-published by the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy institute, where she is a scholar.
The recent improvements make it harder for voters and social media platforms to identify the foreign interference, Kim said.
“For normal users, it is too subtle to discern the differences,” Kim said. “By mimicking domestic actors, with similar logos [and] similar names, they are trying to avoid verification.”
Kim’s report comes weeks after U.S. intelligence officials briefed lawmakers on Russian efforts to stir chaos in American politics and undermine public confidence in this year’s election. The classified briefing detailed Russian efforts to boost the White House bids of both Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that Russia  was still actively waging “information warfare” with an army of fictional social media personas and bots that spread disinformation.
In a rare, joint statement Monday, the leaders of America’s intelligence agencies cautioned that foreign actors were spreading false information ahead of Super Tuesday to “cause confusion and create doubt in our system.”
But intelligence officials have not released any details about the type of disinformation or explained how Americans should protect themselves from it.
Russia has repeatedly denied interfering in the U.S. elections, and did so again on Thursday.
“You just want us to repeat again that we have nothing to do with the U.S. elections,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
Facebook, which had not seen Kim’s report, had no immediate comment, though the company has insisted that it is getting better at responding to the evolving tactics of foreign and domestic actors.
After getting caught off-guard with Russia’s 2016 election interference attempts, Facebook, Google, Twitter and others put safeguards in place to prevent it from happening again. This includes taking down posts, groups and accounts that engage in “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” and strengthening verification procedures for political ads.
Cindy Otis, a disinformation expert and former CIA officer who was not involved in the research, said that while disinformation messaging has not changed much, the technology used to disseminate the bad information is evolving and improving.
“Certainly with the Russians, they know what kinds of narratives work in the U.S.,” Otis said. “The whole system of disinformation is very effective and they know that it is.”
Kim’s report pulls back the curtain on some of the online techniques Russia has already used in this year’s presidential race.
Her review identified thousands of posts last year from more than 30 Instagram accounts, which Facebook removed from the site in October after concluding that they originated from Russia and had links to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian operation that targeted U.S. audiences in 2016. Facebook owns Instagram. Analysis from Graphika, a disinformation security firm, also concluded at the time that the accounts went to “great lengths to hide their origins.”
Kim’s analysis found the accounts appeared to mimic existing political ones, including one called “Bernie.2020_” that used campaign logos to make it seem like it was connected to Sanders’ campaign or was a fan page for his supporters, Kim said.
Some presidential candidates also were targeted directly.An account called Stop.Trump2020 posted anti-Trump content. Other Instagram accounts pushed negative messages about Democrat Joe Biden.
“Like for Trump 2020,” said one meme featuring a portrait photo of Trump and a photo of Biden. “Ignore for Biden 2020.”
It was posted by an Instagram account called Iowa.Patriot, one of several accounts that targeted specific communities in crucial swing states like Michigan, Ohio and Iowa with messaging.
The accounts also appeared to capitalize on other divisive American issues that emerged after the 2016 election.
Some Instagram accounts pretended to be liberal, feminist groups as fallout from the (hash)MeToo movement, which has exposed sexual misconduct allegations against high-profile public figures. Other accounts targeted conservative women with posts that criticized abortions.
“I don’t need feminism, because real feminism is about equal opportunity and respect for women. NOT about abortions, free birth control ….” a meme on one account read.
The accounts varied in how often they posted, the size of their following and the traction the posts received. But they carried the hallmarks of a Russian-backed online disinformation campaign, Kim said.
“They’re clearly adapting to current affairs,” Kim said. “Targeting both sides with messages is very unique to Russia.”
  
          
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Britain’s chief medical officer briefed lawmakers Thursday amid an expected surge in confirmed cases of coronavirus, saying the country is moving from a “containment” phase to one focused on “delaying” the spread, in a bid to avoid high peaks of infections that could overwhelm healthcare services.But confusion was prompted later when Downing Street officials briefed the media, saying the British government is still focused on containment and did not want to move prematurely to implement ramped-up measures that would have broad economic and social impact.The chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, warned that Britain’s national health service could run out of intensive care beds at the peak of a coronavirus outbreak, with half the country’s cases expected to occur in a three-week period. He told lawmakers there is now a “very slim to zero” chance of halting the virus globally and in Britain.Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson reacts during a press conference at Downing Street on the government’s coronavirus action plan in London, March 3, 2020.He said moving from containment to delay would not immediately change the government’s response, but the elderly will ultimately be advised to stay away from others during the peak of an outbreak, similar to warnings that the Italian government issued Wednesday in its effort to battle the spread of the novel coronavirus.In Italy there was dismay Thursday when it emerged that a 55-year-old has died from the virus  — breaking the pattern of the virus killing only the elderly. Of the more than 100 deaths in Italy so far, all have been between 63 and 95-years-old and had underlying pre-existing illnesses. The 55-year-old’s death — as well a 61-year-old doctor succumbing to the virus — have broken that pattern. Neither were known to have any serious pre-existing conditions.“We have moved from a situation where we are mainly in contain, with some delay built in, to we are now mainly delay,” Whitty said. “I think we should work on the assumption it is here, on very low levels, at this point in time.”He said a peak is expected in about two months. Britain now has 90 confirmed cases of infection. But privately medical officials say they think there may be many cases that have gone unreported.“One of the things which is clear, if you model out the epidemic, is you will get 50 percent of all the cases over a three-week period and 95 percent of the cases over a nine-week period, if it follows the trajectory we think it’s likely to. If all of those were spaced out on the NHS over two or three years, that would be easily manageable, but it’s the fact they are so heavily concentrated,” he said.Pedestrians wear face masks as they walk at Piccadilly Circus main tourist destination in central London, as the public are asked to take precautions to protect themselves from the COVID-19 Coronavirus outbreak, March 5, 2020.British medical officials say they are not convinced by the Italian strategy of closing down schools and universities to halt the virus.  And they have a different view on the fatality rate from the Italians and the World Health Organization. They say they are confident that the death rate of the virus would be no higher than one percent. On Tuesday World Health Organization officials say the mortality rate for COVID-19 is at 3.4 percent globally, higher than previous estimates of about two percent.Chinese data has found the elderly to be much more vulnerable, with death rates rising to nine percent in people over 80-years-old.Some medical experts say, though, calculating the “case-fatality-ratio” is tricky.“It is surprisingly difficult to calculate the death rate, during an epidemic,” said John Edmunds, a professor at the Center for the Mathematical Modeling of Infectious Diseases, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “This is because it takes some time to die.  In the case of COVID-19, the time between onset of disease and death is quite long — two to three weeks or more – so the number of cases that you should divide by is not the number of cases that we have seen to this point, but the number of cases that there were a few weeks ago.   Estimating what fraction of the cases might be reported is very tricky,” he added.Also he noted not all cases of infection will be reported because only mild symptoms are suffered.“If there are many more cases in reality, then the case-fatality-ratio will be lower,” he told the Science Media Center website.For the British government — much with their counterparts in European states affected by the outbreak — it is a difficult challenge to try to halt the spread of the virus and prepare for the worst while seeking to allay public alarm. While tamping down talk of moving from a containment phase to one focused on delay, British officials are also making it clear that a spread will prompt more draconian responses.Among those possible responses in Britain would be the likely closing down of parliament. Downing Street advisers and officials at the Palace of Westminster, which houses both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, have been having discussions whether to suspend sittings of the legislature from next month until September. The fear is that the virus could spread quickly in the building because of the large number of people who visit it.Earlier this week the government unveiled its battle plan for different stages of the spread of the virus. The plan would include banning sporting events and mass gatherings, closing schools, suspending some public transportation and urging businesses to encourage employees to work from home.Prime Minister Boris Johnson added some confusion Thursday by telling reporters that some of his science and medical advisers were doubtful about the effectiveness of some of the measures being considered, if infections surge. What they “are telling me is, actually, slightly counter-intuitively, things like closing schools and stopping big gatherings don’t work as well perhaps as people think in stopping the spread,” he said.
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British regional airline Flybe collapsed Thursday after a plunge in travel demand, making the long-struggling carrier one of the first big corporate casualties of the coronavirus outbreak.The failure of an airline that connects all corners of the United Kingdom with major European destinations not only puts around 2,400 jobs at risk but could also see some airports struggle and regional economies hit.“All flights have been grounded and the UK business has ceased trading with immediate effect,” Flybe said after the government walked away from a rescue package agreed to in January.Virus hits airlines’ bottom linesAirlines around the world have been canceling flights and warning of a hit to profitability after coronavirus first emerged in China, hitting flights across Asia, before it spread to Europe and beyond.British Airways, easyJet, Virgin Atlantic, Lufthansa, Norwegian Air and United Airlines are among those warning about the impact of a virus that looks set to hit the industry harder than the 2003 SARS outbreak.Flybe’s collapse will also cause more problems for Prime Minister Boris Johnson who had promised to “level up” Britain by investing in regional transport links.His government had agreed a rescue deal for the 41-year-old airline in January, saying it was important to maintain connections across the country for its 8 million passengers.It said on Thursday there was nothing more it could do.“We are also urgently working with industry to identify how key routes can be re-established by other airlines as soon as possible,” Transport Minister Grant Shapps said.Rescue deal unravelsFlybe, the largest independent regional airline in Europe, operated between 81 airports and was owned by Virgin Atlantic, Stobart Group and Cyrus Capital.The owners said they had plowed more than 135 million pounds ($174 million) into the business in the last 14 months, including around 25 million pounds pledged in January.January’s rescue deal had seen the government agree to match the owners’ support for Flybe with a potential loan, a deferral of taxes and a review of local flight tax rules.That briefly formed part of Johnson’s plan to try to boost the regions of Britain beyond London. Without Flybe though, some regional airports like Exeter, Birmingham and Southampton will have much poorer connections.However, rival airlines complained that the state should not prop up failing companies and environmental campaigners argued any move to reduce the cost of flying did not fit with the government’s aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions.Regional airportsFlybe’s 68 aircraft flew to airports including Belfast City in Northern Ireland, Jersey in the Channel Islands, Birmingham in central England and Scotland’s Inverness and provided more than half of UK domestic flights outside London.The pilot’s union said airline staff had been betrayed by the owners and the government.In a sign of the ripple effect the virus can have, Britain’s biggest commercial free-to-air broadcaster ITV warned Thursday its advertising revenue had been hit by travel companies pulling spending.Stobart and Virgin Atlantic said they were deeply disappointed with the outcome.“Sadly, despite the efforts of all involved to turn the airline around, not least the people of Flybe, the impact of COVID-19 on Flybe’s trading means that the consortium can no longer commit to continued financial support,” they said.It is the second major British airline to go bust in six months after the world’s oldest travel firm Thomas Cook collapsed in September, stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers and sparking the largest peacetime repatriation effort in British history.The country’s broader airline strategy was also thrown into disarray last week when a court ruled a plan to expand Europe’s biggest airport Heathrow was unlawful.
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Appeals judges at the International Criminal Court gave the green light Thursday for prosecutors to open an investigation targeting the Taliban, Afghan forces and U.S. military and intelligence personnel for war crimes and crimes against humanity.The global court upheld an appeal by prosecutors against a pretrial chamber’s rejection last April of Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s request to open a probe in Afghanistan.Pretrial judges last year acknowledged that widespread crimes have been committed in Afghanistan, but rejected the investigation saying it wouldn’t be in the interests of justice because the likely lack of cooperation meant convictions would ultimately be unlikely.FILE – Public prosecutor Fatou Bensouda attends a trial at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, the Netherlands, July 8, 2019.That decision drew fierce criticism from human rights organizations who said it neglected the desire of victims to seek justice in Afghanistan and effectively rewarded states that refused to cooperate with the Hague-based court.On Thursday, rights groups swiftly hailed ICC for upholding victims’ right to accountability, and paving the way for the United States to be held to account for the first time for actions.“Today, the International Criminal Court breathed new life into the mantra that ‘no one is above the law’ and restored some hope that justice can be available — and applied — to all,” said Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and ICC Victims Legal Representative, told VOA News.“In authorizing this critical and much-delayed investigation into crimes in and related to Afghanistan, the Court made clear that political interference in judicial proceedings will not be tolerated,” she said.Even though an investigation has now been authorized, it remains to be seen if any suspects eventually indicted by prosecutors will appear in court in The Hague — both Afghanistan and the United States have strongly opposed the investigation and the U.S. government refuses to cooperate with the global court.At a hearing in December, prosecutors argued that pretrial judges at the global court overstepped their powers last April when they refused to authorize an investigation. The appeals judges agreed.“The Appeals Chamber considers it appropriate to amend the appealed decision to the effect that the prosecutor is authorized to commence an investigation into alleged crimes committed on the territory of Afghanistan since May 1, 2003, as well as other alleged crimes that have a nexus to the armed conflict in Afghanistan,” Presiding Judge Piotr Hofmanski said.After a preliminary probe in Afghanistan that lasted more than a decade, Bensouda asked judges in November 2017 to authorize a far-reaching investigation.She said there is information that members of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies “committed acts of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, rape and sexual violence against conflict-related detainees in Afghanistan and other locations, principally in the 2003-2004 period.”FILE – Personal attorney to President Donald Trump, Jay Sekulow, speaks to reporters during the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, Jan. 23, 2020, on Capitol Hill in Washington.She also said the Taliban and other insurgent groups have killed more than 17,000 Afghan civilians since 2009, including some 7,000 targeted killings, and that Afghan security forces are suspected of torturing prisoners at government detention centers.At a December hearing, the government of Afghanistan said it objected to the investigation and has set up a special unit to investigate war crimes. The ICC is a court of last resort that only takes on cases if domestic jurisdictions are unable or unwilling to prosecute.There was no official U.S. delegation at December’s appeal hearing, but President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, appeared on behalf of the European branch of the American Center for Law and Justice and told judges that the U.S. position wouldn’t change.He told appeals judges that “it is not in the interests of justice to waste the court’s resources while ignoring the reality of principled non-cooperation.”
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Javier Perez de Cuellar, the two-term United Nations secretary-general who brokered a historic cease-fire between Iran and Iraq in 1988 and who in later life came out of retirement to help re-establish democracy in his Peruvian homeland, has died. He was 100.His son, Francisco Perez de Cuellar, said his father died Wednesday at home of natural causes. Current U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the Peruvian diplomat a “personal inspiration.”“Mr. Perez de Cuellar’s life spanned not only a century but also the entire history of the United Nations, dating back to his participation in the first meeting of the General Assembly in 1946,” said Guterres in a statement late Wednesday.Perez de Cuellar’s death ends a long diplomatic career that brought him full circle from his first posting as secretary at the Peruvian embassy in Paris in 1944 to his later job as Peru’s ambassador to France.When he began his tenure as U.N. secretary-general on Jan. 1, 1982, he was a little-known Peruvian who was a compromise candidate at a time when the United Nations was held in low esteem.Serving as U.N. undersecretary-general for special political affairs, he emerged as the dark horse candidate in December 1981 after a six-week election deadlock between U.N. chief Kurt Waldheim and Tanzanian Foreign Minister Salim Ahmed Salim.Once elected, he quickly made his mark.Shaking the UN houseDisturbed by the United Nations’ dwindling effectiveness, he sought to revitalize the world body’s faulty peacekeeping machinery.His first step was to “shake the house” with a highly critical report in which he warned: “We are perilously near to a new international anarchy.”With the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and with conflicts raging in Afghanistan and Cambodia and between Iran and Iraq, he complained to the General Assembly that U.N. resolutions “are increasingly defied or ignored by those that feel themselves strong enough to do so.”During his decade as U.N. chief, Perez de Cuellar would earn a reputation more for diligent, quiet diplomacy than charisma.“He has an amiable look about him that people mistake for through and through softness,” said an aide, who described him as tough and courageous.Quiet diplomacyFaced early in his first term with a threatened U.S. cutoff of funds in the event of Israel’s ouster, he worked behind the scenes to stop Arab efforts to deprive the Jewish state of its General Assembly seat. There was muted criticism from the Arab camp that he had given the Americans the right of way in the Middle East.In dealing with human rights issues, he chose the path of “discreet diplomacy.” He refrained from publicly rebuking Poland for refusing to allow his special representative into the country to investigate allegations of human rights violations during the Warsaw regime’s 1982 crackdown on the Solidarity trade union movement.He came back for a second term after a groundswell of support for his candidacy, including a conversation with President Ronald Reagan, who — in the words of the U.N. chief’s spokesman — expressed “his personal support for the secretary-general.”“Just about all the Western countries have told him they’d like to see him stay on,” a Western diplomatic source said at the time. “There is no visible alternative.”Unlike his predecessor, Kurt Waldheim who was regarded as a “workaholic” and who spent long hours in his office, Perez de Cuellar liked to get away from it all. “He is very jealous of his own privacy,” a close aide said.“When I can, I read everything but United Nations documents,” Perez de Cuellar confided to a reporter. Once on a flight to Moscow, an aide observed that “in the midst of it all, the secretary-general had time for splendid literature.”Trilingual, Perez de Cuellar read French, English and Spanish literature.Lebanon hostagesPerez de Cuellar spent much of his second term working behind the scenes on the hostage issue, resulting in the release of Westerners held in Lebanon, including the last and longest held American hostage, journalist Terry Anderson, who was freed Dec. 4, 1991.All told, Perez de Cuellar’s diplomacy helped bring an end to fighting in Cambodia and the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.Shortly after midnight on Jan. 1, 1992, he walked out of U.N. headquarters to his waiting limousine, no longer the secretary-general, but having attained his final goal after hours of tough negotiations: a peace pact between the Salvadoran government and leftist rebels.“Mr. Perez de Cuellar played a crucial role in a number of diplomatic successes, including the independence of Namibia, an end to the Iran-Iraq War, the release of American hostages held in Lebanon, the peace accord in Cambodia and, in his very last days in office, a historic peace agreement in El Salvador,” Guterres said.Became diplomat 1944Javier Perez de Cuellar was born in Lima on Jan. 19, 1920. His father a “modest businessman,” was an accomplished amateur pianist, according to the former secretary-general. The family traced its roots to the Spanish town of Cuellar, north of Segovia.In Peru, the family belonged to the educated rather than the landowning class.He received a law degree from Lima’s Catholic University in 1943 and joined the Peruvian diplomatic service a year later. He would go on to postings in France, Britain, Bolivia and Brazil before returning to Lima in 1961, where he served in a number of high-level ministry posts.He was ambassador to Switzerland and then became Peru’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union while concurrently accredited to Poland. Other assignments included the post of secretary-general of the Peruvian Foreign Ministry and chief delegate to the United Nations.After leaving the U.N., Perez de Cuellar made an unsuccessful bid for Peru’s presidency in 1995 against the authoritarian leader Alberto Fujimori, whose 10-year autocratic regime crumbled in November 2000 amid corruption scandals.At the age of 80, Perez de Cuellar emerged from retirement in Paris and returned to Peru to take on the mantle of foreign minister and cabinet chief for provisional President Valentin Paniagua.His impeccable democratic credentials lent credibility to an interim government whose mandate was to deliver free and fair elections. Eight months later, newly elected President Alejandro Toledo asked him to serve as Ambassador to France.Between foreign assignments, he was professor of diplomatic law at the Academia Diplomatica del Peru and of international relations at the Peruvian Academy for Air Warfare.At UN in 1975Transferring to the United Nations in 1975, he was appointed by Waldheim as the secretary-general’s special representative in Cyprus. During his two years on the divided island he helped to promote intercommunal peace talks between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.After a brief stint as Peru’s ambassador to Venezuela, he returned to the United Nations in 1979 as undersecretary-general for special political affairs. In that capacity, he undertook delicate diplomatic missions to Indochina and Afghanistan.Perez de Cuellar resigned his U.N. post in May 1981, just before the election campaign for U.N. secretary-general heated up, and returned to the Peruvian diplomatic service.President Fernando Belaunde Terry recommended Perez de Cuellar for nomination as U.N. secretary-general.Perez de Cuellar married the former Marcela Temple. He had a son, Francisco, and a daughter, Cristina, by a previous marriage.His funeral will be Friday.
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Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan heads to Moscow on Thursday for a high-stakes meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin aimed at de-escalating tensions between the armies of Turkey, a NATO member, and Russia, a nuclear superpower, in Syria’s war-torn Idlib province. While nominally partners in a fight against terrorism in the region, Moscow and Ankara have been cast on a seemingly unavoidable collision course in Idlib — the territory in northwest Syria where Russia is helping its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, wipe out one of the last bastions of opposition to his rule. Turkey, along with Western governments, accuses the Syrian government of carrying out a bombing campaign with Russian support that has provoked a humanitarian crisis, with nearly a million civilians fleeing the fighting for the Syria-Turkey border.    The siege has also met with forceful pushback from Ankara because it opposes Assad’s rule. In response, Turkey has launched a military campaign intended to protect what it says are largely anti-Assad rebels, not terrorists, in the Idlib stronghold.   During his briefing with reporters Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia hoped for a compromise with Erdogan, despite those differences.   “We expect to reach a common understanding on the crisis, the cause of the crisis, the harmful effects of the crisis, and arrive at a set of necessary joint measures,” Peskov said.    FILE – Syrian army soldiers fire a weapon as they advance on the town of Kfar Nabl, Syria, March 2, 2020.In turn, Erdogan has indicated he expects to negotiate a cease-fire with Putin over Idlib, despite vowing that a recent spate of Turkish attacks against Syrian government targets were “only the beginning” of revenge for the deaths of several dozen Turkish soldiers in Syrian bombing raids last week.    Injecting more uncertainty ahead of the talks was Assad.  In an interview with the Kremlin-backed Rossiya-24 channel, the Syrian leader said his forces would finish the operation in Idlib before moving on to mop up remaining pockets of resistance.    “I’ve said many times that Idlib, from a military point of view, is a steppingstone, and they put all their forces to stop its liberation so we can’t proceed to the east,” Assad said, accusing Turkey and its NATO alliance partner, the United States, of trying to thwart his inevitable military progress.   The art of diplomacy  On the eve of the Putin-Erdogan summit, events surrounding the Idlib battlefield continued to churn unpredictably, a sign that all sides were trying to increase bargaining positions ahead of the talks.  On Wednesday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said Turkey had violated earlier negotiated agreements with Moscow, accusing Ankara of providing direct military aid to terrorist groups in Idlib who routinely fire on Russia’s main base in the region.   Russia also seized the strategic town of Saraqeb from Turkish-backed rebels, a move that according to Russian media reports put Russian soldiers in the immediate line of fire from Turkish forces. No injuries were reported.   Multiple reports also suggested Russia had beefed up its naval presence by dispatching a fourth warship to the region. Meanwhile, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov insisted that Western reports of mass refugee flows and a humanitarian crisis along the Turkey-Syria border were overblown and reflected “fake concern” over the issue.   Turkey, Konashenkov argued, had instead been intentionally pushing refugees from other countries toward Europe to try to gain concessions and backing from the European Union in Ankara’s standoff with Moscow.   FILE – Turkish soldiers hold their positions with their tanks on a hilltop on the outskirts of Suruc, at the Turkey-Syria border, overlooking Kobani, Syria, during fighting between Syrian Kurds and Islamic State militants, Oct. 12, 2014.’Tsar vs. sultan’ Russia entered the Syrian civil war in 2015, aiding Assad in what the Kremlin insisted was an anti-terrorist campaign against Islamic State, and what Western powers have billed as a ruthless effort to root out opposition to Assad’s rule.   For a time, Moscow and Ankara papered over those differences, choosing to focus on a common enemy in Islamic State, which had carried out terrorist attacks in both countries, killing scores of people. Later deals involving trade, energy and oil also helped their alliance.   Yet the standoff over Assad has always been at the core of the relationship between Putin and Erdogan, which Russian media have billed as ‘”the tsar vs. the sultan.” Analysts in Moscow see a dangerous game in which Russia’s ambitions to become a Middle East power broker through Syria have bumped into Turkey’s ascension as a key regional player. “For Turkey, it’s about its own internal stability, and of course, huge ambitions,” Alexey Malashenko, chief researcher at the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute, told VOA in an interview.  “But the presence of Russia in the south of Syria proves once again that Russia is still a power. If there’s no Assad, Russia’s not in Syria, and we’re not in the Middle East.” The facts of war   Despite its role as a Middle East powerbroker, Russia’s presence has struggled to stem recent fighting between Damascus and Ankara. FILE – Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan speaks during the funeralof Turkish soldier Emre Baysal, killed in Syria’s Idlib region, in Istanbul, Turkey, Feb. 29, 2020.Turkey said Syrian government airstrikes killed 54 Turkish soldiers in February alone, including 33 airstrikes in Idlib last week.  Turkish forces responded by shooting down three Syrian government warplanes and striking a military airport deep inside Syrian territory, which killed what Turkey said were over 100 Assad regime loyalists.    “We said that we would avenge the death of our martyrs,” Erdogan said this week. “By destroying the regime’s warplanes and tanks, we are making it pay a very heavy price.” As casualties mounted on both sides, analysts in Moscow openly questioned whether Russia could assert pressure to stop the fighting, even if it wanted to.  “Of course, Russia has a certain degree of influence on Damascus. But you could also look it at from another angle — that it’s Russia who is trapped,” Alexey Khlebnikov, a Middle East and North Africa expert at the Russian International Affairs Council, said in an interview. “It cannot say to Damascus, ‘If you don’t do this, we’ll withdraw our forces and leave.’ It won’t happen.” The implication? Despite any agreements between Putin and Erdogan in Thursday’s meeting, Assad may not follow the script. 
 
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Its doomed maiden voyage happened more than a century ago, but the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 remains the stuff of popular culture and the object of deep-sea salvage.  A firm has recovered more than 5,000 of its artifacts, but as VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports, time may be running out to raise the ship’s Holy Grail.
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President Nicolas Maduro wants Venezuelan women to have many children as a way to boost the country, which has seen millions of people flee in recent years to escape its economic crisis.Maduro made the exhortation during a televised event Tuesday evening for a government program promoting various birth methods.”God bless you for giving the country six little boys and girls,” the socialist president told a woman at the event. “To give birth, then, to give birth, all women to have six children, all. Let the homeland grow!”The comments drew criticism from human rights activists and others who noted Venezuelans already are struggling to provide food, clothes and health care for their families.”It is irresponsible, on the part of a president of the Republic, to encourage women to have six children simply to make a homeland, when there is a homeland that does not guarantee children their lives,” said Oscar Misle, founder of CECODAP, a group that defends the rights of young people.FILE – Pastor, 3, and Josue, 4, both of whom have been hospitalized in the past for malnutrition according to their mother Gregoria Hernandez, walk outside their house in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, Nov. 28, 2019.The country’s economic collapse, coupled with its deep political divisions, led more than 4.5 million Venezuelans to emigrate since 2015, according to the United Nations.The U.N. World Food Program also recently said that 9.3 million people — nearly one-third of Venezuela’s population — are unable to meet their basic dietary needs.”You have to be very cynical to ask that we have six children,” said Magdalena de Machado, a housewife picking through scraggly vegetables at a street market in the center of Caracas for making soup for her sons, ages 2 and 4.”Only two days a week we can serve some meat and chicken. For years we were late having children. We had them when we thought we were better off, but in the last year we’ve been buying less and less food,” she said.De Machado and others also questioned how women could be expected to increase births amid the deterioration in the country’s health care, both for adults and children.A report by Humans Rights Watch in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health concluded last year that the health system in Venezuela has “totally collapsed.” Among other problems, it cited rising levels of maternal and child mortality as well as the spread of vaccine-preventable diseases.
 
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Ukraine’s parliament voted in favor of appointing the president’s choice for a new prime minister, 44-year-old Denys Shmyhal, after overwhelmingly accepting the resignation of his predecessor, Oleksiy Honcharuk.In all, 291 members of the Verkhovna Rada voted for Shmyhal’s appointment on Wednesday with 59 opposing, 46 abstaining, and nine not voting.Earlier, 353 lawmakers voted to accept Honcharuk’s resignation, paving the way for Shmyhal to take over the post as part of a reshuffle of the government by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.A total of 49 deputies abstained, while nine did not vote.Ukrainian sources have told RFE/RL that other cabinet members will likely also lose their positions in the shake-up.In a speech before parliament ahead of the votes, Zelenskiy blamed Honcharuk for failing to halt an industrial slump and for not meeting tax collection targets.“We need new brains and new hearts in the government,” said the president, whose approval ratings have been dipping lately.The reshuffling comes less than a year after Zelenskiy ushered in the youngest and freshest government to reduce the influence of oligarchs and eliminate opportunities for corruption — two aspects that have dominated Ukrainian life since the country gained independence in 1991.However, public trust in Zelenskiy has slid from nearly 80 percent in September to around 50 percent last month, polling figures from Kyiv-based policy center Razumkov Center show.The shake-up also comes days after a mission from the International Monetary Fund visited Kyiv to discuss a long-delayed $5.5 billion loan that Ukraine has failed to unlock over policy and legislative disagreements.Shmyhal was named deputy prime minister in February. He previously served as head of the regional administration in the western Ivano-Frankivsk region, where he made a name for himself as a business-friendly governor.In 2017-2019, Shmyhal worked as an executive at DTEK, an energy holding owned by Ukraine’s richest billionaire, Rinat Akhmetov. Shmyhal has rejected allegations that he was close to Akhmetov, saying he never met him and was hired to work for DTEK through a competitive process.A native of Lviv, he headed several business enterprises for most of the previous decade before entering the civil service at the Lviv regional administration. He has studied abroad, including in Belgium, Canada, Georgia, and Finland.A 35-year-old former lawyer and a political newcomer, Honcharuk was named prime minister in August 2019.He previously submitted his resignation on January 17, amid a scandal surrounding an audio recording in which he allegedly disparages the economic knowledge and competence of both himself and Zelenskiy.Zelenskiy at the time declined to accept it. 
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The Louvre is no longer taking cash, because of the coronavirus outbreak.   The world’s most-visited museum is shifting to card-only payments as part of new measures that helped persuade employees worried about getting sick to return to work Wednesday. Louvre workers who guard Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” and other masterpieces walked off the job on Sunday, fearful of being contaminated by the museum’s flow of tourists from around the world.
    
The Louvre’s move could bring it into conflict with the Bank of France, which said refusing cash is illegal and unnecessary.
    
Fears that banknotes might be vectors of disease aren’t restricted to the Louvre.   Visitors stand in line to enter the Chateau de Versailles, west of Paris, March 3, 2020.At the Versailles Palace, another huge tourist draw on the outskirts of Paris, employees also are worrying about handling banknotes and tickets during the virus epidemic, although the former residence of French royalty still takes cash for now.
    
Public health historian Patrick Zylberman says the fear of getting diseases from money is age-old. In the Middle Ages, banknotes were cleansed with smoke because it was thought their use contributed to the spread of plague, Zylberman said. Egypt also smoked banknotes during a 1940s cholera epidemic, he said.
    
Zylberman laughed when told of the Louvre’s new refusal of cash payments from the museum’s tens of thousands of daily visitors.
    
“It’s a bit risible to go backwards by several centuries and act as our predecessors did in the 17th century,” he said. “That shows how nervous people are during an epidemic.”
    
But the Bank of France said said vendors aren’t allowed to refuse cash payments because banknotes are legal tender and because banks from the 19-country eurozone regularly test them to see if they present a danger to public health.
    
“There is no proof that the coronavirus has been spread by euro banknotes,” the bank said in a statement to The Associated Press.
    FILE – The Louvre museum is pictured in Paris, March 2, 2020.The Louvre’s decision to only accept bank cards for payments was among the anti-virus measures laid out in detail in a document sent to staff Tuesday and seen by the AP.
    
The Louvre confirmed Wednesday that the museum will no longer accept cash, although it also noted that half of its tickets sales already take place online.
    
“Cash is finished,” said Andre Sacristin, a union representative at the Louvre. “It is a temporary measure during the epidemic.”
    
“Money is very dirty and a vector of bacteria,” Sacristin added. “It’s hand-to-hand and there are direct physical contacts.”
    
Louvre employees will also be distanced from the snaking line of visitors in the room where the “Mona Lisa” is displayed. Instead of rubbing shoulders with visitors in the room itself, workers will be posted at entrances and on the edges of the habitually large crowds waiting to see the iconic portrait.
    
There have also been discussions between Eiffel Tower workers and managers over the use of banknotes, but no decision has been made.
    
At the Versailles Palace, union representative Damien Bodereau said staff members also are worried about handling cash and “worried about checking tickets.”
   
But refusing cash might not be practical, because “some people don’t have bank cards,” he said. “It could be complicated.”
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Italian media reported Wednesday Italy was closing all schools and universities until mid-March amid a coronavirus outbreak as governments around the world continue to take measures to keep the virus from spreading.Italy reported a sharp increase in coronavirus deaths on Tuesday, up to 79, the most outside of China. Iran, meanwhile, has again canceled Friday prayers in major cities.With China seeing a slowdown of new cases of the virus, the focus on containing the outbreak has shifted to places such as Italy and Iran, which have not only seen their own cases steadily increase, but have also had their citizens and others who traveled from those areas test positive while in other countries.India, which has linked cases to Italian tourists, said Wednesday the number of cases there jumped from five to 28.South Korea reported more than 500 new coronavirus cases Wednesday, as health officials said more than 2,000 people in the city hardest hit by the outbreak, Daegu, were waiting for open spaces in hospitals.South Korea has seen the most cases outside of China, and is planning to spend about $10 billion on medical resources and measures to counteract the economic impact of the outbreak.Wednesday also brought news of the first death in Iraq, where so far all of its cases are connected to Iran.Medical staff treat a critical patient infected by the COVID-19 with an Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) at the Red Cross hospital in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province, March 1, 2020.Worldwide, the coronavirus has infected more than 93,000 people and killed more than 3,100, with the vast majority in both categories in China.The expansion of the outbreak has reached several new countries, including Jordan, Morocco, Senegal, Portugal and Saudi Arabia.  Saudi Arabia has banned its citizens from performing the Muslim pilgrimage in Mecca.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged people around the world Tuesday to stop hoarding masks and other protective gear, saying health care workers need them.People wearing masks stand in a line to buy face masks in front of a drug store amid the rise in confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus disease of COVID-19 in Daegu, South Korea, March 3, 2020.Experts say surgical masks are not guaranteed protection against the virus, but say they are essential equipment for doctors and nurses.Tedros said he is concerned about the “severe and increasing disruption to the global supply of personal protective equipment caused by rising demand.”
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Amazon and other big companies are trying to keep their employees healthy by banning business trips, but they’ve dealt a gut punch to a travel industry already reeling from the virus outbreak.The Seattle-based online retail giant has told its nearly 800,000 workers to postpone any non-essential travel within the United States or around the globe. Swiss food giant Nestle told its 291,000 employees worldwide to limit domestic business travel and halt international travel until March 15. French cosmetics maker L’Oreal, which employs 86,000 people, issued a similar ban until March 31.
Other companies, like Twitter, are telling their employees worldwide to work from home. Google gave that directive to its staff of 8,000 at its European headquarters in Dublin on Tuesday.
Major business gatherings, like the Geneva International Motor Show and the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, have also been canceled.
On Tuesday, Facebook confirmed it will no longer attend the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, which is scheduled to begin March 13. And the 189-nation International Monetary Fund and its sister lending organization, the World Bank, announced they will replace their regular spring meetings in Washington — scheduled for mid-April — with a “virtual format.”
Michael Dunne, the CEO of ZoZo Go, an automotive consulting company that specializes in the Chinese market, normally travels from California to Asia every six weeks. But right now he’s not planning to cross the Pacific until June.
“With everything at a standstill, I do not feel a sense of missing the action,” Dunne said. “But there is no better catalyst for business than meeting people in person.”
Robin Ottaway, president of Brooklyn Brewery, canceled a trip to Seoul and Tokyo last week. He has indefinitely suspended all travel to Asia and also just canceled a trip to Copenhagen that was scheduled for March.
“I wasn’t worried about getting sick. I’m a healthy 46-year-old man with no preexisting conditions,” Ottaway said. “My only worry was getting stuck in Asia or quarantined after returning to the U.S. And I’d hate to be a spreader of the virus.”
The cancellations and travel restrictions are a major blow to business travel, which makes up around 26% of the total travel spending, or around $1.5 trillion per year, according to the Global Business Travel Association.
The association estimates the virus is costing the business travel industry $47 billion per month. In a recent poll of 400 member companies, the group found that 95% have suspended business trips to China, 45% have cut trips to Japan and South Korea and 23% have canceled trips to Europe.
“It’s a big deal,” said Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst in San Francisco who estimates that airlines get 55% of their revenue from business travelers, since they’re more likely to sit in pricier business or first-class seats.
“On a long-haul flight to Europe or Asia, a business-class traveler can be five times more profitable than someone in coach,” Harteveldt said.
Figures from the Airlines Reporting Corp. indicate that airline ticket sales fell about 9% during one week in late February, compared with a year earlier.
Hotels are also worried about declines in business travel. In the U.S. alone, hotel bookings for business travel were expected to reach $46.8 billion this year, according to Phocuswright, a travel research firm.
In the week through Feb. 22, San Francisco saw an 11% decline in hotel occupancy, according to STR, a hotel data company. AT&T, Verizon and IBM were among the companies that pulled out of the city’s RSA cybersecurity conference, which began Feb. 24.
Backing out of industry events can be a tough call for businesses. Luke Sorter, owner of Pavel’s Yogurt, spent last weekend agonizing over whether his company should attend Natural Products Expo West, a major industry gathering in Anaheim, California.
Sorter spent nearly $20,000 on conference fees and travel expenses, but then rumors began circulating that nearly all the major retailers he was hoping to pitch were pulling out.
“This was going to be our big push to make some sales and open up some new accounts, and we were really disappointed because all of the major buying groups had pulled out of the show,” said Sorter, whose San Leandro, California-based company pulls in about $1.2 million to $1.5 million in revenue per year.
On Tuesday, Expo West announced it would be postponed until a later date.
“I was relieved because it just didn’t seem safe to put 50, 60, 70,000 people in a building together and the whole show is predicated on sharing and sampling food and handshakes, and person-to-person interaction,” Sorter said.
Some experts say it’s smart for companies to curtail travel before things get worse. Worldwide, 92,000 people have been sickened by the virus and 3,100 have died.
“If you knowingly put your employees in harm’s way during travel, you can be held responsible for their injury or their death,” said Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition, which advocates for corporations and governments that hire travel management companies.
In some cases, workers themselves are demanding a halt to travel. The pilots’ union at American Airlines sued last month to make the airline stop flying to China. American agreed to suspend flights to mainland China but initially tried to keep serving Hong Kong. Pilots wouldn’t do it.
When pilots began reporting nervousness about going to Milan and flights were less full, American suspended that service much more quickly, said Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the union.
In some cases, companies are also asking employees to cancel meetings with outside visitors to cut down on the risk of transmission. In a memo sent to Ford Motor Co.’s nearly 200,000 employees Tuesday, Ford CEO Jim Hackett asked employees to meet with suppliers and others by phone or virtually.
Ford also said only the most critical travel will be approved for employees through March 27.
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Wednesday, the nonprofit group, Freedom House, releases its annual report on freedom and the state of democracy around the world.  Continuing a 14-year trend, some of the findings are discouraging.  As VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports, the group says individual freedoms and democratic systems are under attack.
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The European Union has pledged over three-quarters of a billion dollars to help Greece cope with a surge in the number of migrants trying to cross into the country from Turkey, as the bloc fears a repeat of the 2015 crisis. Greece has closed down the land border and ramped up security across the frontier. The EU says Ankara is fully to blame for the crisis, as tens of thousands of migrants remain camped out along the border. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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The European Union has pledged over $780 million to help Greece cope with a surge in the number of migrants trying to cross into the country from Turkey, as the bloc fears a repeat of the 2015 refugee crisis.Greece has closed down the land border and ramped up security around islands in the Aegean Sea close to Turkey. Athens and the EU say Ankara is fully to blame for the crisis, as tens of thousands of migrants remain camped out along the border.Turkish authorities released video Tuesday appearing to show Greek security forces firing into the water close to a migrant boat off Lesbos Island.Meanwhile, Greece released its own video purporting to show a Turkish government patrol boat apparently helping a dinghy full of migrants cross towards Lesbos island.Greece is deploying soldiers and military hardware along the frontier. Athens received a show of solidarity Tuesday as the presidents of the European Union Commission, Council and Parliament joined the Greek prime minister on a visit to the land border.Migrants scuffle with Greek police at the port of Mytilene after locals block access to the Moria refugee camp, on the northeastern Aegean island of Lesbos, Greece, March 3, 2020.“This border is not only a Greek border, but it is also a European border,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters after the visit. “And I stand here today as a European at your side. I also want to express my compassion for the migrants that have been lured through false promises into this desperate situation. We have come here today to send a very clear statement of European solidarity and support to Greece.”Thousands of migrants descended on Turkey’s western border beginning last Friday, after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan encouraged them to head for Europe.“The EU needs to keep its word, has to keep its promises,” Erdogan said at the weekend. “We are not obliged to look after and feed so many refugees. If you’re honest, if you’re sincere, then you need to share (the burden). We are hosting 3.7 million Syrians in our country. We are in not in a position to endure a new wave of migration. … The number of people going to the border will soon be expressed in millions,” he warned.Turkey has accused the EU of failing to offer support following the intense fighting in Syria’s Idlib province, which has forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes. Dozens of Turkish soldiers have been killed in the fighting between Russian-backed Syrian government forces and Turkish-back rebels in recent weeks.The majority of migrants heading for Greece appear to be Afghans, alongside people from Iran, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis accused Ankara of blackmail Tuesday.“The tens of thousands of people who tried to enter Greece for the past few days did not come from Idlib, they have been living safely in Turkey for a long period of time. Europe will not be blackmailed by Turkey over the refugee issue,” Mitsotakis said. “What has happened here over the past days is painfully obvious to everyone. Turkey, in full breach of the EU-Turkey statement, has systematically encouraged and assisted tens of thousands of refugees and migrants to illegally enter Greece. … This is a blatant attempt by Turkey to use desperate people to promote its geopolitical agenda and to divert attention from the horrible situation in Syria.”Migrants walk on the road near the Ipsala border gate in Edirne, at the Turkish-Greek border, March 3, 2020.Many migrants are attempting to cross the Evros river that runs along part of the frontier. Afghan migrant Sinan Yilmaz is among thousands of asylum-seekers camping along the Turkish side of the border.“Friends of ours came through last night, but they took everything, their money, their shoes, and sent them back here. That’s why we don’t consider it, unless the doors open, God willing,” Yilmaz said.Human rights groups have criticized Europe’s response.“Solidarity is absolutely the key, but the kind of solidarity needs to be sharing responsibility for hosting and processing asylum-seekers rather than solidarity which is about keeping people away from Europe,” Ben Ward of Human Rights Watch told VOA. He also criticized Turkey’s recent actions. “Asylum-seekers are people, with families, with loved ones, with hopes and dreams. And they ought to be treated with dignity and respect. And obviously treating them like pawns is never acceptable.”Among Greeks attitudes appear to have hardened. On Lesbos island local residents tried to prevent a migrant boat from coming ashore Sunday. Greece and Europe are counting on public support for the hard-line stance and put the blame squarely on Turkey.Caught in the middle are tens of thousands of desperate migrants, the pawns in a game of diplomatic brinkmanship.
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A Mexican scientist pleaded not guilty Tuesday to U.S. charges that he spied for Russia in Miami.
The plea was entered in a brief hearing by Ronald Gainor, attorney for 35-year-old Hector Cabrera Fuentes. Cabrera stood nearby in chains and a tan jail outfit but did not speak.
Cabrera also has now been formally indicted on a charge of acting as a Russian agent without registering as required with the U.S. attorney general. He is not charged with espionage, but this allegation still carries a potential prison sentence of 10 years.
According to an FBI affidavit, a Russian government official tasked Cabrera with tracking down a vehicle owned by a U.S. government informant in the Miami area. The job was simply to take a photo of its license plate.
The FBI says Cabrera and his Mexican wife went to a condominium complex on Valentine’s Day to take the photo and were recorded by surveillance video. They attracted the notice of security by driving directly behind another car through a gate.
It’s not clear exactly what the Russians were seeking, but the FBI affidavit says the informant had previously provided information about Russian intelligence operations and implications for U.S. national security.
After he was detained Feb. 16 at Miami International Airport, Cabrera told the FBI he has two wives — the Mexican one and a Russian one. The Russian woman and her two daughters were living in Germany but returned to Moscow last spring to attend to some administrative matters. Then, the Russian government wouldn’t let them leave, the affidavit says.
That prompted Cabrera in May 2019 to visit his family in Moscow, where he was approached by a Russian official whom he had met previously at professional events and exchanges. Cabrera told the FBI he believed the official was an intelligence officer and that person gave him the job of photographing the Miami informant’s license plate.
Cabrera, a microbiologist who has held several prestigious posts, is originally from El Espinal in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.
Cabrera had been working as an associate professor at the medical school jointly run by Duke University and the National University of Singapore, and was working in Singapore. He said at a previous hearing that his contract there has been terminated.
Before Cabrera’s license plate mission, the FBI says the Russian official asked him to rent an apartment in the same complex as the informant but not in his real name. Cabrera paid an associate $20,000 to do so in late 2019. It’s not clear if anything was done in connection with that unit.
Cabrera is being held without bail. No trial date has been set.  
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Victims of clerical sex abuse have expressed skepticism over a Vatican investigative commission that will collect statements and information about abuse in Mexico, though most said they would meet with Pope Francis’ investigators.
    
“Only by speaking with them can you demand results,” said Biani Lopez-Antunez, who was abused by a Legion of Christ school director in Cancun between the ages of 8 and 10 years old. “The results of this visit must be measured only based on the facts, the reports, because I’m already tired of the fake action that operates at all levels of the Church.”
    
The Vatican announced Tuesday that two investigators, Charles Scicluna, archbishop of Malta and deputy secretary for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Jordi Bertomeu, will be in Mexico City March 20-27. They will meet with bishops, leaders of religious orders and victims who want to speak with them. They promise confidentiality.
    
Mexico, which has the second highest number of Catholics in the world, has been accumulating cases of abuse and cover-ups for years. Meanwhile more and more victims like Lopez-Antunez are speaking up in the face of Vatican claims of “zero tolerance” to say that they are still waiting for justice.
    
The Mexican Episcopal Conference says the commission is coming at its request. It is made up by the same church officials who went to Chile in 2018 to investigate one case and returned with 2,600 pages of statements from more than 60 victims. It led Pope Francis to ask forgiveness and led to legal action.
    
“There has to be intervention from some other external authority to determine criminal responsibility because if it is only the ecclesiastic commission, it’s very difficult for something to happen,”said Alberto Athie, a former Mexican priest who has campaigned for more than 20 years for victims of clerical abuse. If not, the commission could become just another example of the Vatican going through the motions but not getting to the bottom of it.
    
For that reason, Athie believes a proposal before the Mexican Senate to create an independent investigative commission is critical, because it could “reconstruct the truth and turn over to the proper authorities all of those responsible,” including the abusers and those who covered up their actions.
    
The number of victims in Mexico is unknown.
    
The best known case in Mexico is that of Rev. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ religious order. The Vatican took over the Legion in 2010 after revelations that Maciel, sexually abused dozens of his seminarians, fathered at least three children and built a secretive, cult-like order to hide his double life.
    
The Mexican Episcopal Conference, which scheduled a news conference for Tuesday to announce the investigative mission, said in January that it was investigating 271 priests for abuse in the past decade – 155 of whom have been referred to prosecutors – but it did not provide a number of victims.
    
Jesus Romero Colin, a psychologist and director of Inscide, a nongovernmental organization that supports victims of sexual abuse, said there could be thousands. Romero Colin himself was abused by a priest in his church when he was 11 years old.
    
“In my case, there were 20 victims and I was the only one who came forward,” he said. “Of 50 victims that have come to our organization, only two filed formal complaints and there are priests who abused 100 or 130 victims.”
    
Romero Colin’s case is an exception. His abuser, Carlos Lopez Valdez was the first priest convicted in Mexico of pederasty and is currently serving a 63-year prison sentence.
    
He said he will meet with the investigators. “The important thing is that the survivors have a direct line to the Vatican, we skip all the intermediaries,” he said.
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A German cruise ship with 1,200 passengers is moored in southern Norway waiting for the test results of two passengers who had been on land to be tested for the new coronavirus, officials said Tuesday.
The town of Haugesund, 110 kilometers (70 miles) south of Bergen, Norway’s second largest city, was alerted Monday by the ship’s agent that two passengers on the Aida Aura had been in contact with a third person a week ago who tested positive for the virus. That person was not on the ship.
The 202-meter (663-foot) long and 28-meter (92-foot) Aida Aura is operated by the German cruise line AIDA Cruises.
After visiting the ship, a doctor with the municipality of Haugesund said none of the passengers showed symptoms of having the COVID-19 illness.
“The guests were contacted by health authorities in Germany as part of a routine investigation into a medical situation. All guests on board have already been informed about this. All passengers remain on board, visits on land aren’t taking place,” the cruise company said in a statement.
Both cruise ship passengers were tested on land and the results were expected later Tuesday.
The nationality of the passengers on the German ship was not immediately known.
In recent weeks, cruise liners have been either moored with passengers stuck aboard or banned from entering harbors amid growing worry about the spread of the virus.
In Japan, some 3,700 people on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship were forced to endure a long quarantine in their cabins. Hundreds of passengers on that ship tested positive for the illness and several people died from it.
Cruise ships have also been turned away from Caribbean ports due to concerns over the virus, though no passengers on any of those ships has been confirmed to have the disease.
Norway’s coastline is a popular destination for cruise ships because of its breath-taking landscapes and fjords. 
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Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny says his finances, along those of his wife, children, parents, and the head of his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) have been frozen without explanation in a move to discredit and disgrace him.The staunch Kremlin critic wrote on his website on Tuesday that bank accounts and payment cards for his family, and for FBK head Ivan Zhdanov and his family, had been blocked.At the same time, Navalny said he obtained information that billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who has strong links to Russia’s leadership, was suing him for unknown reasons.According to Navalny and Zhdanov, a check of their banks online showed that they both had negative balances of 75.5 million rubles ($1,130,000).Navalny accused President Vladimir Putin of orchestrating the situation, alleging that by freezing his and his associate’s accounts, the Kremlin was trying to impede the FBK’s activities at a time when many Russians are becoming disillusioned with the country’s current leadership.Navalny and the FBK regularly publish materials exposing the luxurious properties and wealth of Russian officials, accusing them of corruption. None of the reports, however, have sparked legal investigations by the authorities.Navalny, a lawyer by training who has doggedly pursued evidence of corruption at the highest level of Russian politics, founded the FBK in 2011.Its investigations regularly provoke public uproar over the misuse of state funds, such as in 2017, when an FBK probe into Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s wealth became a catalyst for a wave of mass rallies that erupted across Russia.
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Firefighters who run into burning buildings or attack wildfires face considerable risks despite their protective gear.  Until recent trials in Spain, central command centers had no way to monitor the health of their teams.  VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports that recently changed because of one inventive firefighter and a large cash prize.
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