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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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U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said Saturday that consultations were still underway on setting a start date for a seven-day trial of reduced violence negotiated with the Taliban in Afghanistan.   “That is a moving date because we are still doing consultations, if you will, … so I can’t give you a hard date right now,” Esper told reporters in Munich, Germany, after attending a security conference there. U.S. officials have said a successful implementation of the temporary reduction in violence would pave the way for a comprehensive peace deal with the insurgent group that could end America’s longest war and bring home about 13,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan. “Where we are right now is on the doorstep of a reduction-of-violence period. If we decide to move forward, if all sides hold up — meet their obligations under that reduction in violence — then we’ll start talking about the next part, whether to move forward [with the comprehensive peace agreement],” Esper said. As part of the short-term agreement, he added, the United States will suspend “a significant part of our operations,” though the Pentagon chief declined to discuss details. U.S. officials say the deal binds the Taliban to halt major attacks, including roadside and suicide bombings, against Afghan and U.S.-led international forces anywhere in the country. FILE – A captured Taliban insurgent is presented to the media after he was detained with car explosive devices in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, Dec. 10, 2019.Some risk, but ‘promising’Earlier, Esper told an audience at the Munich Security Conference the reduction in violence was not without risk but looked “very promising” and “we have to give peace a chance.” He went on to reiterate that “the best if not the only way forward in Afghanistan is through a political agreement, and that means taking some risk.” Taliban sources have said the seven-day period will begin February 22 and the comprehensive peace agreement is expected to be signed on February 29. U.S. and Taliban representatives have negotiated the draft peace agreement during months of meetings in the Gulf state of Qatar. If signed, it immediately could lead to a gradual withdrawal of American forces, bringing the force down to 8,600 personnel in the initial few months. Taliban sources say the agreement will require all foreign troops to leave Afghanistan within two years. Insurgent sources say international guarantors such as the United Nations, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Germany, Norway and Qatar will witness the signing ceremony. The agreement will require the Taliban to open negotiations within 10 days with an inclusive Afghan delegation that represents all political and ethnic groups in the country, including the government in Kabul. That intra-Afghan dialogue will discuss a permanent nationwide cease-fire and power-sharing in postwar Afghanistan. Germany and Norway have both offered to host Taliban-Afghan negotiations, but no final decision has been made. U.S. officials have stressed the troop drawdown plans, however, will be linked to progress in intra-Afghan negotiations and effective implementation of Taliban undertakings, including a further reduction in insurgent violence. FILE – U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo shakes hands with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani with U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper alongside at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, Feb. 14, 2020.Ghani skepticalAfghan President Ashraf Ghani also spoke Saturday at the Munich conference and reiterated his skepticism about the U.S.-led peace process. “The concern that the Taliban could be using a peace process as a ‘Trojan horse strategy’ is there, but you can’t end this war without engaging in a process and testing them,” Afghan media quoted Ghani as saying. Between the signing of the U.S.-Taliban deal and the start of intra-Afghan negotiations, the insurgent group and Afghan authorities would be expected to release prisoners. Taliban officials say they already have given their list of thousands of insurgents being held in Afghan prisons. The troop drawdown agreement was expected to be signed last September, but continued deadly Taliban attacks on Afghan and U.S. troops prompted President Donald Trump to halt the peace process. The negotiations resumed in December, and marked progress has been achieved since then. 
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U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has said China tops the list of the Pentagon’s potential adversaries, followed by Russia and what he called “rogue states” like North Korea and Iran. Esper made the comments at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, where hundreds of world leaders and military personnel are gathered to discuss global conflicts. Henry Ridgwell reports from the meeting.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy vowed Saturday to end the separatist conflict in the east of his country, where fighting between Russia-backed rebels and Ukrainian troops has killed more than 14,000 people since 2014.Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Zelenskiy said he hopes to end the conflict by the end of his presidential term in 2024.“If in five years, we will end the war, bring our people back, then I did (became president) for a reason,” he said.The conflict in eastern Ukraine erupted in April 2014, weeks after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, and has devastated the country’s industrial heartland.Thanking the United States for supporting Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, Zelenskiy expressed hope to “start afresh” Kyiv’s relations with the U.S. now that proceedings for President Donald Trump’s impeachment are over.Ukraine and Zelenskiy were at the center of the impeachment hearings. In a phone call in July that triggered a congressional inquiry, Trump pressured Zelenskiy to investigate the involvement of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son with Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company.In Munich, Zelenskiy said he wants to visit the White House, and he invited Trump to Kyiv.“We have a good relationship with the U.S., and I’m grateful to Americans for their support,” he said.Zelenskiy, a 42-year-old comic actor with no political experience, won Ukraine’s presidential election in 2019 on promises to end the fighting. He has expressed willingness to negotiate a peace agreement with Russia.However, several contentious issues complicate the peace process, including Ukraine regaining control of its border and allowing elections that would give rebel-controlled regions more autonomy.Zelenskiy said Saturday in Munich he wants local elections held across Ukraine, including certain areas of the east, in October. But the votes can’t take place while fighting continues, he said.“People in Donbass need elections that would be recognized as legitimate. But they can’t be that if held not in accordance with Ukrainian laws, to the sound of gunfire and without (Kyiv’s) control of Ukraine’s border,” the president said.Zelenskiy announced discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin in April about another exchange of prisoners. There are currently 200 Ukrainians held in the rebel-controlled areas, Zelenskiy said.
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Airbus said Saturday it “deeply regrets” the U.S. decision “to increase tariffs on aircraft imported from the EU.”The European aerospace corporation said in a statement the new tariffs would heighten “trade tensions between the US and the EU, thereby creating more instability for US airlines that are already suffering from a shortage of aircraft.”The U.S. Trade Representative’s Office said Friday tariffs on aircraft imported from the European Union would rise from 10% to 15%.The tariff hike is expected to go into effect on March 18.The Airbus statement said the tariffs create “more instability for US airlines that are already suffering from a shortage of aircraft.”The jet shortage U.S. airlines are experiencing follows the decision by U.S. plane builder Boeing to take its popular 737 MAX planes out of service after crashes that claimed the lives of 346 people.Talks between the U.S. and the European Union are expected to continue.
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Turkey is deploying tanks and armor in Syria’s Idlib province as Damascus continues its offensive against the last rebel enclave. But in an apparent gesture to Moscow, Ankara is pledging to crack down on radical elements in Idlib, along with calls for “a lasting cease-fire.”  Damascus’s forces are claiming they are advancing against the rebels’ last stronghold. But in a sign of the intensifying fighting, rebels claimed to have to shot down a Syrian government military helicopter Friday, the second this week.  A screen grab taken from a video published by jihadists of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham allegedly shows a Syrian military helicopter being downed, Feb. 12, 2020, in Syria’s war-torn province of Idlib.Ankara reportedly is stepping up its arming of rebels with sophisticated anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons, along with deploying hundreds of armored vehicles and tanks.  The escalating military presence follows Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s vow to drive back Damascus’s forces from Idlib if they don’t withdraw by the end of February. The ultimatum followed the killing of 14 Turkish soldiers this month by Syrian troops.However, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar appeared to strike a different note Thursday, pledging to crack down on radicals in Idlib. Akar said they would be “dealt with by force” and that “all measures” would be considered against them.  The Turkish defense minister was referring to the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which Damascus forces are battling in Idlib. The radical group is now a mainstay of rebel groups in Idlib.  Moscow blames Ankara for the Damascus offensive, claiming it had failed to disarm and remove radical groups as part of a 2018 Sochi agreement aimed at creating a de-escalation zone in Idlib.“The Turkish side had taken upon itself an obligation to neutralize terrorist groups” in Idlib, said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov Friday.Blame gameErdogan had dismissed Moscow’s calls to disarm radical groups, claiming the Russians were responsible for the Idlib fighting, in an increasingly acrimonious blame game.Washington, sensing an opportunity to create a disagreement between Ankara and Moscow, strongly backed Erdogan’s stance in Idlib. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dispatched Ambassador Jim Jeffrey for emergency talks Wednesday. Jeffrey, speaking to reporters Tuesday ahead of negotiations, appeared to suggest every kind of support would be considered, stoking Ankara’s hopes of military support.U.S. National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien appeared to rule out such a move Wednesday, however, asking, “What are we supposed to do to stop that? We’re supposed to parachute in as a global policeman and hold up a stop sign and say stop this, Turkey? Stop this, Russia? Stop this, Iran? Stop this, Syria?”U.S. special envoy for Syria and the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS Jim Jeffrey speaks during a news conference at the State Department in Washington, Nov. 14, 2019.A slap at Washington Turkish pro-government media were quick to hit back Friday against Washington, accusing its NATO ally of duplicity. “James Jeffrey’s deceit can clearly be read on his face. He is running wild at the peak of insolence. Who can call him human,” wrote columnist Taner Korkmaz of the Turkish daily Yeni Safak.Turkish Chief of Staff Yasar Guler spoke Thursday with his Russian counterpart, General Valery Gerasimov, about the situation in Idlib, the Turkish military announced on Twitter. “Erdogan is still a pragmatic man. He still thinks he can win. He can persuade Putin to give him some favors in Syria,” said analyst Atilla Yesilada of Global Source Partners.Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu is scheduled to meet his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, Sunday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.Displaced Syrians pass a house still on fire as they flee shelling on the town of Abyan, in the western rebel-held part of the northern Syrian province of Aleppo, near the border with Turkey, Feb. 12, 2020.No refugee exodusInternational relations expert Soli Ozel of Istanbul’s Kadir Has University says Ankara could be looking to Moscow to save the 2018 Sochi agreement based on rebels giving up territory.   “The best solution is for the Turkish military to withdraw north of the M4 and leave the two highways to the regime,” Ozel said. “And the regime will send a couple of hundred thousand refugees, and we will be stuck with them, at least not in Turkey.”Ozel claims Erdogan’s priority in Idlib is to avert another significant exodus of refugees into Turkey, given the country is hosting of 3.5 million Syrians from the civil war.  The United Nations said Thursday more than 800,000 Syrians had been displaced by fighting in Idlib, with 64,000 sleeping outside and another 14,000 under trees in sub-freezing temperatures. Many reportedly are moving toward the Turkish border.“The level of tolerance of Turkish society for an extra number of Syrians is zero,” Ozel said. “It would generate a lot of tensions. I would be very concerned with inter-communal violence through the vilification of the Syrians, and it would be a pretty precarious situation, I think.”President of Turkey and leader of Justice and Development (AK) Party Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks at the party’s group meeting at Grand National Assembly of Turkey in Ankara, Feb.12, 2020.Sliding economyA slowing economy is exacerbating Turkish discontent over Syrians, with youth unemployment at nearly 25%. Erdogan’s ratings in opinion polls, along with his AKP, are on the slide.Analysts also warn of a potential security threat of an exodus from Idlib, given the presence of large numbers of jihadists.“These radical elements can easily escape into areas of large concentrations of Syrian nationals. In some places, Syrians in Turkey are the majority,” said Haldun Solmazturk, head of the Ankara-based research group the 21st Century Turkey Institute. “If these groups feel betrayed by Turkey, they could use terrorist methods against Turkey,” Solmazlurk said.Ankara already is seeking to curtail the threat of a new refugee exodus. “They are building in a band within 30 miles of the Turkish border, thousands of temporary houses,” Yesilada said.“Which means that if [Syrian leader Bashir al-] Assad wishes to take them back, Turkish military forces will defend those settlements? [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel has reportedly vaguely promised to help finance those settlements. But would these people stay in such settlements with Assad breathing down their necks,” he added. 
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The European Union is being urged to become more militarily involved in Africa’s Sahel region amid a possible drawdown of U.S. troops and a fast-growing Islamist insurgency.Fallout from escalating unrest in the arid scrubland edging the Sahara dessert — threatening to push deeper into sub-Saharan Africa and potentially export instability and migration across the Mediterranean Sea — offers a powerful argument for more European action. That is also the message from France, the United States and the EU’s own executive arm.But it’s not clear whether EU member states have much appetite for more military action. And current EU policy in the region, some analysts say, appears disjointed and scattershot.This pictured taken July 2, 2018 shows the logo of five-nation French-backed anti-terror unit, the “G5 Sahel” force.“We have more than 20 Sahel strategies from European countries,” said Bakary Sambe, director of the Timbuktu Institute, a Senegal-based research group. “That means there is no coordination — while the terrorist groups are coordinating, are trying to support each other and are multiplying their attacks against the countries.”Creating a cohesive European Sahel strategy will be tested next month, during a Brussels meeting that will involve the five African nations most affected by the conflict, known as the G5 Sahel, and EU leaders.   Adding to the pressure are chances the United States may cut troops in Africa — along with a newly released government report describing a U.S. strategic shift from reducing to containing the armed threat in the Sahel. Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger make up the G5 Sahel.The March meeting with G5 leaders “will be the occasion to see how we can have a more effective strategy in the short, medium and long term” in the region, European Council President Charles Michel told Radio France Internationale, or RFI, in an interview this week. European Council President Charles Michel talks to the media during a news conference in Skopje, North Macedonia, Jan. 24, 2020. Guns not enoughExperts say guns alone won’t solve a spiraling humanitarian crisis that has killed thousands of soldiers and civilians, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and left millions in need of assistance. Attacks in three of the most affected Sahel countries — Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — have doubled each year since 2015, according to the U.S. government-funded Africa Center for Strategic Studies. “We begin to fear the very existence of the Sahel states is threatened,” African Union Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat told Le Monde newspaper, ahead of a recent AU summit that focused on the conflict, among other threats.  French President Emmanuel Macron meets soldiers of Operation Barkhane, France’s largest overseas military operation, in Gao, northern Mali, May 19, 2017.For now, former colonial power France is shouldering most of Europe’s military response. Earlier this month, Paris announced it was adding 600 troops to its 4,500-person Operation Barkhane force in the region.   But Barkhane’s presence has fueled public protests in the region — a key subject of a January summit in the French town of Pau between French President Emmanuel Macron and Sahel leaders. Moreover, the deaths of 13 French soldiers in a November helicopter collision has fed criticism at home that France is mired in a conflict it cannot win.A potential U.S. drawdown in the Sahel would mark another setback. Earlier this month, French Defense Minister Florence Parly headed to Washington to lobby against the possibility.  French Minister of Armed Forces Florence Parly speaks during a news conference at the Pentagon, Jan. 27, 2020.France’s Operation Barkhane “will not collapse if the United States withdraws their military assets,” defense expert Elie Tenenbaum told Le Monde, but it would see fewer fighter plane dispatches and reduced intelligence operations, among other changes. “The position of the United States is very clear — they don’t want to be involved in hard strategies, like France,” said analyst Sambe. “They invest in soft power. They empower West African countries to develop strategies against violent extremism.”Yet for now, at least, hard power is also in demand.“We need very strong military actions to stop the jihadist groups before they reach the coastal regions and link up with criminal networks, drugs and weapons,” Sambe said, naming countries like Senegal, Ghana and Guinea.  French President Emmanuel Macron, right, greets Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita prior to a meeting at the G5 Sahel summit in Pau, southwestern France, Jan.13, 2020.Some African countries are responding. Chad was mulling deploying a battalion to the tri-border region of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali that is considered the epicenter of the violence.Mali plans to recruit 10,000 new soldiers — even as President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita told RFI his government was in contact with armed groups as a way to explore other “avenues” to end the violence.  At the same time, the AU announced it would not start using a new fund for security operations until 2023, after it received less than half the contributions it hoped for.  European responseIn Europe, France is pushing for greater EU involvement in counterterrorism operations in the Sahel, notably through a new special forces task force called Takuba. But so far, not many EU countries have agreed or expressed interest in joining.  And crucially, analysts say, France is not getting enough buy-in from its most important European partner, Germany. “France believes Germany hasn’t done enough” in the Sahel, Le Monde wrote this week, even as the Germans “reproach France for not working collectively.”“France now wants better engagement from European countries so it can really be seen as cooperation between Sahelian countries and Europe — not just France alone,” analyst Sambe said, “but I don’t think the European countries are following France in this strategy.”France is not alone in urging greater European participation.“The French are calling on Europe to step up and do more” in the Sahel, the head of U.S. Africa Command, General Stephen Townsend, said in January, adding, “I absolutely think that is the right thing to do.”European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell gives a press briefing after his meetings with Iranian leaders, in Tehran, Feb. 3, 2020.EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell offered a similar message last month, saying Europe “must absolutely do more” in the Sahel, while adding the bloc had agreed to enhance its strategic cooperation.  To be sure, the EU has not been inactive. The so-called Sahel Alliance, grouping France, Germany, the EU and development institutions, has designated billions of dollars for regional development initiatives. Overall, the EU counts among the region’s biggest humanitarian donors, contributing more than $200 million to the crisis last year alone.  Experts also note that having more boots on the ground is only a partial answer to the jihadist insurgency. What is needed, many say, is better governance and more investment in education and development.“France has a very military approach in the region,” analyst Sambe said. “But I always say you have never seen a Kalashnikov [rifle] killing an ideology.”  
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NATO says it will draw down troop levels in Afghanistan if the Taliban show they are willing and able to end violence in the country. That announcement followed a tentative deal struck between the U.S. and the Taliban this week. NATO’s secretary-general made the comments at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, where world leaders assembled to discuss the numerous threats facing the world. VOA’s Henry Ridgwell reports from the conference.
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The annual Munich Security Conference got underway Friday, with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier issuing a warning that Russia, China and the United States were endangering global security. “Russia … has made military force and the violent shifting of borders on the European continent the means of politics once again,” Steinmeier told the audience of leaders, military chiefs and diplomats at the Bayerischer Hof Hotel in the southern German city.He added that China “accepts international law only selectively where it does not run counter to its own interests.” “And our closest ally, the United States of America, under the present administration itself, rejects the idea of an international community. We fall back into the classical security dilemma: more mistrust, more armament and then less security. These are the inevitable consequences.”List of problemsWorld leaders have descended on Munich with a long list of global flashpoints to resolve, from regional conflicts in the Middle East to rising competition between the U.S. and China. Longtime observers of the conference sense a change of tone. “This enhanced sense of danger seems to be pulling the Americans and the Europeans a bit closer together,” said James Davis, a professor of international politics at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo shakes hands with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani as U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper watches during the 56th Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, Feb. 14, 2020.U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who is attending the three-day conference along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, hailed the 82-member coalition that had come together to defeat the Islamic State terror group in Iraq and Syria. “But our work is not finished,” Esper told a news conference Friday. “Coalition members are in unanimous agreement on the need to remain vigilant against a weak and yet still dangerous adversary.”Instability in the Middle East tops the Munich agenda. NATO has stepped forward to take over the training mission in Iraq from the United States, for Iraqi forces battling Islamic State.U.S.-Taliban cease-fireMeanwhile, a possible cease-fire between the U.S. and the Taliban was cautiously welcomed by NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg. “NATO currently has around 16,000 troops in Afghanistan and we are ready to adjust that force level if the Taliban is able to demonstrate the will and real ability to reduce violence and we see a path to peace,” Stoltenberg said.On the sidelines in Munich, beyond the big speeches, there is diplomatic progress. Serbia and Kosovo will reopen rail and highway links after a 20-year break, in a deal brokered by the United States.The biggest clash of the conference is likely to come Saturday when U.S. and Iranian representatives take to the stage, just weeks after the U.S. targeted killing of top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani. FILE – Women walk past a banner of Iranian military commaner Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in Iraq in a U.S. drone attack, in Tajrish square in northern Tehran, Iran, Jan. 9, 2020.“I think the Iranians have understood that this [U.S.] president is willing to push to the edge,” said analyst James Davis. “The killing of Soleimani must have been a wake-up call for them. And he is willing to challenge them in the region. And so I think both sides recognize that the potential for conflict is there. And maybe that’s what you need to restart something of a diplomatic process.”The speeches will be watched closely for any sign of shifting positions.NervousnessThere is an inescapable climate of unease at this year’s Munich Security Conference, with fears over the breakdown of the Western liberal order and the alliances that have maintained it, along with the threat of a new global arms race and an erosion of the controls that have averted major conflict.Optimists say it may be a dangerous world, but at least dialogue is still taking place between global rivals. China, Russia, Iran, India and Japan have all sent senior ministers to the Munich conference. French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are also attending the summit for the first time.
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Kosovo and Serbia have signed a deal to reopen a highway and resume rail service between them. The agreement, signed Friday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, was brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy for the Belgrade-Pristina talks, Ambassador Richard Grenell.  Grenell said the deal represented “historic progress on economic development. Agreements on air, rail and highway connections will facilitate the flow of people and goods between Kosovo and Serbia.” The move came after a January deal signed in Berlin to launch direct commercial flights between Pristina and Belgrade. Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi, writing on Twitter, called the agreement “another milestone! First, the deal on air traffic and today we signed the deal on railways and highways between Kosovo and Serbia. A great step towards reaching a final peace agreement between two countries.” Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said that the deal “will create a better future and ensure peace for the coming decades.” Stalled talksEuropean Union-mediated talks between Serbia and Kosovo over normalizing relations stalled after the previous Kosovo government imposed 100% tariffs on Serbian goods to protest efforts by Belgrade to block Kosovo’s accession into international organizations. Belgrade has said it will not return to the negotiating table until the tariffs are lifted. Kosovo authorities have been under relentless pressure from Western allies to remove the tariffs. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appealed for action to new Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti.  In a letter to Kurti, Pompeo said, “Now is the time to realize comprehensive normalization with Serbia, centered on mutual recognition, which is essential to Kosovo’s full international recognition.”  “Ending tariffs on goods from Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina will be important in bringing parties back to [the] negotiating table,” he added. Kurti has pledged to abolish the tariffs on Serbian imports, but he announced that he would introduce “measures of full reciprocity in trade, politics and economy” with Serbia. On Monday, Kosovo will mark its 12th anniversary of independence, which has been recognized by more than 110 countries including the United States, but not by Serbia and its ally, Russia. 
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