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The United Nations has been hacked.An internal confidential document from the United Nations, leaked to The New Humanitarian and seen by The Associated Press, says that dozens of servers were “compromised” at offices in Geneva and Vienna.Those include the U.N. human rights office, which has often been a lightning rod of criticism from autocratic governments for its calling-out of rights abuses.One U.N. official told the AP that the hack, which was first detected over the summer, appeared “sophisticated” and that the extent of the damage remains unclear, especially in terms of personal, secret or compromising information that may have been stolen. The official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity to speak freely about the episode, said systems have since been reinforced.The level of sophistication was so high that it was possible a state-backed actor might have been behind it, the official said.There were conflicting accounts about the significance of the incursion.“We were hacked,” U.N. human rights office spokesman Rupert Colville. “We face daily attempts to get into our computer systems. This time, they managed, but it did not get very far. Nothing confidential was compromised.”The breach, at least at the human rights office, appears to have been limited to the so-called active directory – including a staff list and details like e-mail addresses – but not access to passwords. No domain administration’s account was compromised, officials said.The United Nations headquarters in New York as well as the U.N.’s sprawling Palais des Nations compound in Geneva, its European headquarters, did not immediately respond to questions from the AP about the incident.Sensitive information at the human rights office about possible war criminals in the Syrian conflict and perpetrators of Myanmar’s crackdown against Rohingya Muslims were not compromised, because it is held in extremely secure conditions, the official said.The internal document from the U.N. Office of Information and Technology said 42 servers were “compromised” and another 25 were deemed “suspicious,” nearly all at the sprawling United Nations offices in Geneva and Vienna. Three of the “compromised” servers belonged to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which is located across town from the main U.N. office in Geneva, and two were used by the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe.Technicians at the United Nations office in Geneva, the world body’s European hub, on at least two occasions worked through weekends in recent months to isolate the local U.N. data center from the Internet, re-write passwords and ensure the systems were clean.The hack comes amid rising concerns about computer or mobile phone vulnerabilities, both for large organizations like governments and the U.N. as well as for individuals and businesses.Last week, U.N. human rights experts asked the U.S. government to investigate a suspected Saudi hack that may have siphoned data from the personal smartphone of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of The Washington Post, in 2018. On Tuesday, the New York Times’s bureau chief in Beirut, Ben Hubbard, said technology researchers suspected an attempted intrusion into his phone around the same time.The United Nations, and its human rights office, is particularly sensitive, and could be a tempting target. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, and her predecessors have called out, denounced and criticized alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity and less severe rights violations and abuses in places as diverse as Syria and Saudi Arabia.Dozens of independent human rights experts who work with the U.N. human rights office have greater leeway – and fewer political and financial ties to the governments that fund the United Nations and make up its membership – to denounce alleged rights abuses.Jake Williams, CEO of data firm Rendition Infosec and former U.S. government hacker, said of the U.N. report: “The intrusion definitely looks like espionage.”He noted that accounts from three different domains were compromised. “This, coupled with the relatively small number of infected machines, is highly suggestive of espionage,” he said after viewing the report.“The attackers have a goal in mind and are deploying malware to machines that they believe serve some purpose for them,” he added.The U.N. document highlights a vulnerability in the software program Microsoft Sharepoint, which could have been used for the hack.Matt Suiche, a French entrepreneur based in Dubai who founded cybersecurity firm Comae Technologies, said that based on the report from September: “It is impossible to know if it was a targeted attack or just some random internet scan for vulnerable SharePoints.”But the U.N. official, speaking to The Associated Press on Tuesday, said that since then, the intrusion appeared sophisticated.“It’s as if someone were walking in the sand, and swept up their tracks with a broom afterward,” the official said. “There’s not even a trace of a clean-up.”
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The BBC said on Wednesday it will cut around 450 jobs from its news division as part of an 80 million pound savings drive and modernization program.The corporation said it would reorganize its newsroom along a “story-led” model where staff will be assigned to stories and not attached to individual programs.
“We need to reshape BBC News for the next decade in a way which saves substantial amounts of money,” said Fran Unsworth, director of News and Current Affairs. “We are spending too much of our resources on traditional linear broadcasting and not enough on digital.”
  
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A powerful magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck in the Caribbean Sea between Jamaica and eastern Cuba on Tuesday, shaking a vast area from Mexico to Florida and beyond, but there were no reports of casualties or heavy damage.
    
The quake was centered 139 kilometers (86 miles) northwest of Montego Bay, Jamaica, and 140 kilometers (87 miles) west-southwest of Niquero, Cuba, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It hit at 2:10 p.m. (1910 GMT) and the epicenter was a relatively shallow 10 kilometers (6 miles) beneath the surface.
    
Dr. Enrique Arango Arias, head of Cuba’s National Seismological Service, told state media that there had been no serious damage or injuries reported on the island.
    
The Cayman Islands were rocked by several of the strong aftershocks that followed in the area, including one measured at magnitude 6.1. Water was cut off to much of Grand Cayman Island, and public schools were canceled for Wednesday.
    
Gov. Carlos Joaquin Gonzalez of Mexico’s Quintana Roo state, which is home to Cancun, Tulum and other popular beach resorts, said the earthquake was felt in multiple parts of the low-lying Caribbean state but there were no reports of damage or injuries.
    
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center initially warned that the quake could generate waves 1 to 3 feet above normal in Cuba, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Honduras, Mexico and Belize, but issued a later message saying the danger had passed.
    
The quake was felt strongly in Santiago, the largest city in eastern Cuba, said Belkis Guerrero, who works in a Roman Catholic cultural center in the center of Santiago.
    
“We were all sitting and we felt the chairs move,’ she said. “We heard the noise of everything moving around.”
    
She said there was no apparent damage in the heart of the colonial city.
    
“It felt very strong but it doesn’t look like anything happened, “she told The Associated Press.
    It was also felt a little farther east at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on the southeastern coast of the island. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damages, said J. Overton, a spokesman for the installation, which has a total population of about 6,000 people.
    
Several South Florida buildings were evacuated as a precaution, according to city of Miami and Miami-Dade County officials. No injuries or road closures were reported. No shaking was felt at the Hard Rock stadium in Miami Gardens, which will host the Super Bowl on Sunday.
    
In the Cayman Islands, the quake left cracked roads and what appeared to be sewage spilling from cracked mains. There were no reports of injuries or more severe damage, said Kevin Morales, editor-in-chief of the Cayman Compass newspaper.
    
The islands experience so few earthquakes that newsroom staff were puzzled when it hit, he said.
    
“It was just like a big dump truck was rolling past,” Morales said. “Then it continued and got more intense.”
    
Dr. Stenette Davis, a psychiatrist at a Cayman Islands hospital, said he saw manhole covers blown off by the force of the quake, and sewage exploding into the street, but no more serious damage.
    
Claude Diedrick, 71, who owns a fencing business in Montego Bay, said he was sitting in his vehicle reading when the earth began to sway.
    
“It felt to me like I was on a bridge and like there were two or three heavy trucks and the bridge was rocking but there were no trucks,” he said.
    
He said he had seen no damage around his home in northern Jamaica.
    
Mexico’s National Seismological Service reported that the quake was felt in five states including as far away as Veracruz, on the country’s Gulf Coast.
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An Istanbul court has defied the European Court of Human Rights, ruling in favor of the continued detention of prominent philanthropist Osman Kavala. In December, the European Court demanded the immediate release of Kavala, who is on trial for sedition.Kavala and 15 other civil society activists are accused of supporting anti-government protests in 2013 against then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is now president.  The protest action came to be known as the Gezi movement, named after an Istanbul park where the unrest started. Prosecutors are calling for life imprisonment without parole.The ECHR condemned the case, calling for an end to Kavala’s more than two years in prison and describing it as “arbitrary” and “politically motivated.”The Istanbul court ruled Tuesday the ECHR decision was provisional because Ankara was appealing the verdict and that Kavala should remain in jail.”The court’s decision is flawed because the European Court ruling was clear in its call for Kavala’s immediate release,” said Emma Sinclair Webb, Turkey researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch.”We saw multiple signs of how unfair this trial is,” said Webb, speaking after attending Tuesday’s court hearing. “The lawyers for Kavala raised many objections to the way witness evidence is used in this case. The court turns a deaf ear to all objections. It’s a shocking indication that once again, Turkey’s judiciary seems to be under heavy pressure of the executive.”Tuesday’s court hearing was marred by chaos, with Kavala’s lawyers challenging the judge’s decision to hear some witnesses without their presence, prompting the lawyers to walk out of the room.  Ankara strongly rejects the ECHR verdict, maintaining that the judiciary is independent. But observers note the case has strong political undertones.  Three months ahead of Kavala’s prosecution, Erdogan accused him of “financing terrorists” and that Kavala was a representative for “that famous Jew [George Soros,] who tries to divide and tear up nations.” Erdogan did not elaborate on the comments about George Soros, who is an international philanthropist.Erdogan’s allegations against Kavala resemble the prosecution case against the jailed activist.Kavala is a pivotal figure in Turkey, using his wealth to help develop the country’s fledgling civil society after a 1980 military coup.
 
“Osman Kavala is very prominent within the civil society in this country,” said Sinan Gokcen, Turkey representative of Swedish-based Civil Rights Defenders. “He is not a man of antagonism; he is a man of preaching dialogue, a man of building bridges.”FILE – Lawyers for jailed philanthropist Osman Kavala hold a press conference in Istanbul, Turkey, Oct. 31, 2018.Gokcen works to support Turkish human rights defenders and says Kavala’s prosecution has far-reaching repercussions for civic society.”It means that they [the Turkish government] can detain any member of civil society in Turkey regardless of what this person is defending or advocating and can keep this person as long as they want despite any legal mechanism. We feel unprotected. In a way, we feel powerless to end such a situation. We feel powerless and intimidated,” added Gokcen.Turkey is in the grip of a legal crackdown following a 2016 failed coup blamed by the president on dissident military elements with links to Turkish-Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen. Gulen lives in self-imposed exile in the United States and is a staunch opponent of Erdogan.Hundreds of journalists, human rights defenders and members of the wider Turkish civic society have been prosecuted and jailed. The government says it is defending democracy, but critics argue the crackdown is more about silencing critics.Human Rights Watch Monday called on the United Nations to review Turkey’s “human rights crisis and the dramatic erosion of its rule of law framework.” On Tuesday, Turkey faced its third Universal Periodic Review (UPR) before the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.Ankara claims it remains committed to human rights and cites its plans to introduce a package of legal reforms. But critics cite the ongoing prosecutions as evidence of the government’s real intentions.”The huge number of journalists, politicians, and perceived government critics in prison and on trial flies in the face of the Turkish government’s public statements about the state of human rights in the country,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch.With the U.N. having few tools to sanction Turkey, the European Union is seen as offering the best hope by human rights advocates of applying pressure on Ankara.Turkey’s EU membership bid is already frozen, in part due to human rights concerns. But Ankara is seeking to extend a customs union, along with visa-free travel for its citizens with the EU.  “It’s time all European countries should be speaking out very loud and clear on cases like this [Kavala],” said Sinclair-Webb.But even high-profile cases like Kavala’s have seen Brussels offer only muted criticism of Ankara. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Istanbul Friday for talks with Erdogan saw little criticism of Turkey’s human rights record. Instead, discussions focused on Ankara’s recent deployment of soldiers to Libya and the upholding of an EU-Turkish agreement controlling migrants entering Europe.”There are many issues to talk about with Turkey,” said Sinclair Webb. “Syria, Libya, Turkey, hosting so many refugees from Syria, and this often takes priority over Turkey’s domestic human rights crisis. This means there isn’t sufficient clarity on cases like this. What we are seeing is Turkey defying Europe’s human rights court.”
 
Some analysts suggest Brussels could yet be lobbying behind the scenes for Kavala’s release, tying Ankara’s calls for extra financial assistance for refugees to gestures on human rights. 
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A powerful magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck in the Caribbean Sea between Jamaica and eastern Cuba on Tuesday, shaking a vast area from Mexico to Florida and beyond, but there were no immediate reports of casualties or heavy damage.The quake was centered 139 kilometers (86 miles) northwest of Montego Bay, Jamaica, and 140 kilometers (87 miles) west-southwest of Niquero, Cuba, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It hit at 2:10 p.m. (1910 GMT) and the epicenter was a relatively shallow 10 kilometers (6 miles) beneath the surface.Dr. Enrique Arango Arias, head of Cuba’s National Seismological Service, told state media that there had been no serious damage or injuries reported.The quake was felt strongly in Santiago, the largest city in eastern Cuba, said Belkis Guerrero, who works in a Roman Catholic cultural center in the center of Santiago.”We were all sitting and we felt the chairs move,” she said. “We heard the noise of everything moving around.”She said there was no apparent damage in the heart of the colonial city.”It felt very strong but it doesn’t look like anything happened,” she told The Associated Press.It was also felt a little farther east at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on the southeastern coast of the island. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damages, said J. Overton, a spokesman for the installation, which has a total population of about 6,000 people.Several South Florida buildings were evacuated as a precaujtion, according to city of Miami and Miami-Dade County officials. No injuries or road closures had been reported.The quake also hit the Cayman Islands, leaving cracked roads and what appeared to be sewage spilling from cracked mains. There were no immediate reports of deaths, injuries or more severe damage, said Kevin Morales, editor-in-chief of the Cayman Compass newspaper.Witness reportsThe islands experience so few earthquakes that newsroom staff were puzzled when it hit, he said.”It was just like a big dump truck was rolling past,” Morales said. “Then it continued and got more intense.”Dr. Stenette Davis, a psychiatrist at a Cayman Islands hospital, said she saw manhole covers blown off by the force of the quake, and sewage exploding into the street, but no more serious damage.Claude Diedrick, 71, who owns a fencing business in Montego Bay, said he was sitting in his vehicle reading when the earth began to sway.”It felt to me like I was on a bridge and like there were two or three heavy trucks and the bridge was rocking but there were no trucks,” he said.He said he had seen no damage around his home in northern Jamaica.The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the quake could generate waves 1 to 3 feet above normal in Cuba, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Honduras, Mexico and Belize.The USGS initially reported the magnitude at 7.3.
 
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In a groundbreaking case in France, energy giant Total is being sued for allegedly failing to adequately fight climate change.The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday by environmental groups and local authorities who feel it has potential global implications.The legal action against Total will be the first use of a 2017 French law to sue for climate inaction. The legislation requires major French companies to draft so-called “vigilance plans” to prevent environmental damage, among other areas. The plaintiffs said Total has not done so when it comes to climate change.  “We’re filing a lawsuit against them because they’re still not making the energy transition necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees,” said Paul Mougeolle, who represents Notre Affaire a Tous, an environmental NGO that has filed a separate climate action case against the French government.  “Total has 1% of greenhouse gases worldwide — more than the carbon footprint of France,” Mougeolle said. “So, we think Total has a special responsibility towards this energy transition.”Fourteen local authorities and five civil society groups have joined the Total lawsuit, which reflects a broader grass-roots uprising on climate in Europe and elsewhere.  This alliance said companies that contribute to climate change should help pay the price for mitigating it and dealing with the consequences.France’s central Val de Loire region is part of the lawsuit.Regional councilor Benoit Faucheaux describes last summer’s devastating drought, which dried up rivers in his region of central France. Experts said climate change will make such droughts longer, more frequent and more devastating.  “We hope Total will change its business model, that it will shift from that situation where it produces energy and fossil energies (to) another model where they are involved in energy transition,” Faucheaux said.Sebastien Mabile of Seattle Advocates law group, which has taken on the case, is uncertain about its chances — because it’s a legal first. But if it succeeds, he said, its impact could be big.  “Because Total … operates in 130 countries,” Mabile said. “So, this case can have implications all over the world, such as the U.S., Africa, in all of the oil and gas basins.”Total faces a separate but somewhat similar lawsuit for allegedly failing to plan for potential human and environmental impacts of an Ugandan oil project. The company did not respond VOA’s requests for comment.
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The U.S. Geological Survey says a powerful magnitude 7.7 earthquake has struck south of Cuba and northwest of Jamaica.
It was centered 125 kilometers north-northwest of Lucea, Jamaica, and hit at 2:10 p.m. (1910 GMT) Tuesday. The epicenter was a relatively shallow 10 kilometers (6 miles) beneath the surface.
It’s not immediately clear if there are damage or injuries.
The USGS initially reported the magnitude at 7.3.
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The pressure on Britain’s disgraced Prince Andrew increased Tuesday after the revelation by U.S. authorities that he has failed to cooperate with the FBI’s investigation into his ties with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Lawyer Lisa Bloom, who represents five of Epstein’s alleged sexual trafficking victims, said Tuesday that it’s time for Andrew “to stop playing games and to come forward to do the right thing and answer questions.”
Bloom said her clients were “outraged and disappointed at Prince Andrew’s behavior.”
Andrew remained out of the public eye Tuesday. Buckingham Palace and his legal team maintained a “no comment” policy one day after U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said Andrew has provided “zero cooperation” to the FBI and the U.S. prosecutors seeking to speak with him about Epstein.
The statement Monday by Berman, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, was the first official confirmation that the leading U.S. law enforcement agency had sought — and failed — to obtain evidence from Andrew, third child of Queen Elizabeth II, despite his pledge in November that he would cooperate with legitimate law enforcement agencies.
The U.S. decision to make the 59-year-old prince’s silence public may be part of a strategy to increase public calls for him to cooperate.FILE – Financier Jeffrey Epstein looks on during a bail hearing in his sex trafficking case, in this court sketch in New York, July 15, 2019.Andrew is being sought for questioning as a witness who may be able to shed light on the illegal activities of Epstein, who died in a New York prison in August while awaiting trial on sexually abusing teenage girls. There’s no indication that U.S. officials are pursuing criminal charges against the prince.
The FBI only has limited ways to try to convince Andrew to give evidence.
U.S. officials have not provided details, so it’s not clear if the FBI made an informal request through Andrew’s lawyers or went through formal police channels, which if successful would have led to an interview conducted by U.K. police, possibly with an FBI agent present.
“They can’t compel him to do any of those things,” said British lawyer Ben Keith, a specialist in extradition and law enforcement. “The next stage after that is to issue a formal Mutual Legal Assistance Request, which would go through the Foreign Office and be dealt with in the court system.”
That could lead, Keith said, to the prince giving evidence via video link to U.S. investigators.
Andrew has been accused by a woman who says that she had several sexual encounters with the prince at Epstein’s behest, starting when she was 17.
Virginia Roberts Giuffre says after meeting Epstein as a teenager in Florida in 2000, he flew her around the world and pressured her into having sex with numerous older men, including Andrew, two senior U.S. politicians, a noted academic, and the attorney Alan Dershowitz, who is now part of President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team.
Giuffre has said she had sex with Andrew three times, including once in London in 2001 at the home of Epstein’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell. Giuffre claims that she was paid by Epstein for her sexual encounters.
Andrew and Dershowitz have denied any wrongdoing. But the royal family forced Andrew to step down from his royal duties and charity patronages in November after giving a disastrous television interview in which he defended his friendship with Epstein and failed to express sympathy for the girls and women who Epstein abused.
Andrew is also being pursued by several lawyers representing Epstein victims who are pushing civil suits against Epstein’s estate.
Those lawyers could choose to bring their request to a British high court, seeking to have an examiner take a statement from Andrew or pursue other ways to obtain his evidence. So far they are only making public calls for him to make himself available and threatening to subpoena Andrew if he travels to the U.S.
The complex legal situation may make Andrew reluctant to visit the U.S., where his evidence is sought on both criminal and civil cases, but lawyers say it’s unlikely to restrict his travel to other countries.
New York criminal defense lawyer Ron Kuby says it’s unlikely the prince will ever voluntarily agree to an interview and said the FBI doesn’t have the means to force him to.
“The likelihood of him participating is very, very small,” Kuby said. “Why would he? The last time Prince Andrew spoke on the relevant topic he was yanked from public life and universally ridiculed.”
Andrew, eighth in line to the throne, has been seen at occasional royal family events since November but has not commented on Epstein since his TV interview backfired.  
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Members of Turkey’s largest journalism trade union rallied outside Ankara’s Communications Directorate on Monday to protest the government’s mass cancellation of state-issued press credentials.According to the Journalist’s Union of Turkey, known by its Turkish acronym TGS, and international press advocacy groups, such as the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), up to 1,400 press cards have been canceled in recent months.Most of the journalists targeted for cancellation, observers say, report for independent news outlets or publications critical of the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.Although journalists are permitted to work without press cards, the passes are the only documents that allow reporters to access Parliament and other government buildings.”As journalists, we don’t need permission from anyone,” Esra Koçak, Ankara-branch chairman of TGS, told independent Turkish news agency Bianet. “We want to protect people’s right to receive information, which is our only motto.”Indefinite reviewIn 2019, Turkish communications officials announced plans to change the traditionally yellow press card to turquoise and require all reporters to submit applications for the new cards no later than Jan. 26, 2020.FILE – Journalists are seen during a stake-out in Istanbul, Turkey, Oct. 31, 2018.Since that announcement was made, hundreds of applications for renewal have remained under indefinite review without explanation, and journalists left in bureaucratic limbo have been instructed to await a ruling on the status of their individual applications.Although some reporters were told they could continue using their old yellow cards in the meantime, Ankara officials invalidated all yellow cards on the Jan. 26 deadline.Officials with Turkey’s Communications Directorate did not respond to requests for comment, but the agency’s director, Fahrettin Altun, took to Twitter Monday to deny allegations of mass decredentialing.”Reports regarding the cancellation of press passes is not accurate,” he wrote, appending a diagram showing several phases of the press card application process.Turkish communications officials, he wrote in further posts, must first determine whether applicants are “professionally engaged in journalistic activity, whether he/she is affiliated with a terrorist organization and whether he/she has been engaged in any action or conduct that tarnishes the integrity of the profession.”Altun put the number of the unconcluded applications at 894.Some cards reactivatedAfter several hours of protests on Monday, some journalists found that their cards were at least partially reactivated, suddenly indicating a “still in use” status on government web portals, leading some to questions whether the government had begun walking back the restrictions.”It appears that the Directorate decided to correct the mistake,” said a TGS spokesperson. “We call on the officials to issue the new press passes that have been put on hold for the past year with no reason provided.”Ankara’s Communications Directorate has reported to President Erdogan’s office since June 2018, when Turkey scrapped its parliamentary system for an executive presidential system of governance.FILE – Journalists work on a hilltop in Ceylanpinar, Sanliurfa province, southeastern Turkey, covering Ankara’s incursion into Syria, Oct. 20, 2019.According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, 15 reporters and the top editor of Istanbul-based Evrensel have been denied reporting credentials, as have journalists working for other left-leaning dailies such as BirGün and Cumhuriyet.”Turkey’s decision to cancel the press cards for hundreds of journalists is yet another attack on independent reporting and is absolutely unacceptable,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities should immediately restore the journalists’ press credentials, and should ensure that passes are granted in an impartial process.”Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, known by its French acronym RSF, ranked Turkey 157 out of 180 countries in its 2019 annual World Press Freedom Index.”After the elimination of dozens of media outlets and the acquisition of Turkey’s biggest media group by a pro-government conglomerate, the authorities are tightening the vice on what little is left of pluralism – a handful of media outlets that are being harassed and marginalized,” said the RSF report, which identifies Ankara as the world’s second largest jailer of journalists.The 2019 RSF index ranked the United States 48 out of 180, a three-slot drop from 45th place in 2018, as “rhetorical attacks from the government and private individuals alike grew increasingly hostile.”CPJ reported that Turkey revoked press credentials of some 900 journalists after the attempted coup in 2016. 
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The European Union on Tuesday slapped sanctions on seven people accused of undermining Ukraine’s sovereignty for their role in organizing Russian local elections in the Crimean Peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014.The seven, who will see their assets frozen and face travel bans in Europe, include a top official in Crimea and senior electoral commission officers in the city of Sevastopol whom the EU blame for running the elections on Sept. 8.”Through their involvement in the elections, these people actively supported actions and implemented policies which undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine,” EU headquarters said in a statement.The move means that 177 people and 44 “entities” – organizations, associations or companies – are now under EU sanctions over allegations of undermining Ukraine’s territorial integrity.The EU imposed sanctions on Russia after it annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and the bloc refuses to recognize Moscow’s authority there. It has separate sanctions targeting the Russian economy which are due to remain in place until at least July 31. 
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A moderate earthquake shook buildings in western Turkey on Tuesday, sending people running into the streets for safety, Turkish media reports said. Authorities said there were no immediate reports of any injury or major damage.
    
The quake came just four days after a strong earthquake struck eastern Turkey on Friday, toppling buildings and causing 41 deaths. More than 1,600 people were also hurt in the 6.8-magnitude quake.
    
Turkey’s emergency and disaster management agency, AFAD, said Tuesday’s quake measured 4.8 and was centered near the town of Kirkagac, in Manisa province. It occurred at 2:26 p.m. (1126 GMT) at a depth of 6.99 kilometers (4.34 miles). The Istanbul-based Kandilli seismology center said the quake measured 5.1.
    
Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu told reporters there were no initial reports of damage or injuries. Turkish media said the quake was felt in Istanbul and Izmir.
    
In Manisa, people ran out into the streets in panic when they felt the shaking, private NTV television said. An abandoned house collapsed in one village near Kirkagac, the station reported.
    
Earthquakes are frequent in Turkey, which sits atop two major fault lines. Manisa was hit by a magnitude 5.4 earthquake on Jan. 22 which caused a few derelict structures to collapse.
    
Turkey’s worst quake in decades came in 1999, when a pair of strong earthquakes struck northwest Turkey, killing around 18,000 people.
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The European Union will “never, never, never” compromise on the integrity of its single market, its chief Brexit negotiator warned Britain on Monday, saying London must now face reality after underestimating the costs of leaving.Some British politicians have suggested Brussels might be flexible on its rules in order to protect trade flows in talks due to begin in the coming weeks after Britain’s formal exit from the bloc on Friday.But Michel Barnier, speaking in the British region of Northern Ireland widely seen as most at risk from Brexit, warned negative consequences were unavoidable.”There will be no compromise on the single market. Never, never, never,” Barnier told an audience at Queen’s University Belfast, describing the single market as the foundation of EU’s international influence.Michel Barnier, the European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator, speaks to the media at Government Buildings in Dublin, Ireland, Jan. 27, 2020.”Leaving the single market, leaving the customs union will have consequences. And what I saw … in the last year, is that many of these consequences have been underestimated in the UK,” he said. “Now we have to face the reality.”Hard choicesBarnier said that while Brussels was willing to be flexible and pragmatic in trade talks, Britain’s choices have made frictionless trade with the EU impossible.If no trade agreement is reached, Britain still faces the risk of a cliff-edge Brexit in 2021 when an 11-month status quote transition ends, he added.”If we have no agreement, it will not be business as usual and the status quo, we have to face the risk of a cliff edge, in particular for trade,” Barnier said.The EU has repeatedly said the level of access UK products can continue to enjoy will be proportionate to the commitments London makes on EU rules, particularly in relation to state aid.”It is not clear to me whether, when the UK leaves the EU and the Single Market, it will also choose to leave Europe’s societal and regulatory model. That is the key question, and we are waiting for an answer,” Barnier said.Northern IrelandIrish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar earlier Tuesday said there would have to be some checks on goods going from Britain into Northern Ireland, despite British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s repeated insistence that these will not be needed.Johnson’s willingness to allow some EU regulations to apply in Northern Ireland to prevent the need for a border on the island was the crucial concession he offered last year to obtain a withdrawal deal with the bloc.Barnier was asked repeatedly by journalists in Belfast whether trade talks could avoid the need to have checks, but he would only say the text of the withdrawal agreement that governs it was binding and could not be revisited.”The Withdrawal Agreement must be applied with rigor and discipline by all sides. It cannot be re-opened under the guise of implementation,” Barnier said. Implementation will be crucial in building trust for the trade talks, he added.Varadkar earlier on Monday told Britain’s BBC that the European Union would have the upper hand in trade talks, having the “stronger team” due to its larger population and market. Johnson’s aim of getting a deal by the end of 2020 “will be difficult,” Varadkar added.
 
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The United States is refusing to rule out shrinking the size of its military presence in Africa despite warnings that without Washington’s help, critical counterterror efforts could fall apart.French Defense Minister Florence Parly delivered the latest plea for continued U.S. involvement in the counterterror fight Monday during talks with top U.S. military officials at the Pentagon.But following the meeting, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Washington had to take into account other urgent priorities.”We are focused on great power competition, first with China, then Russia,” Esper told reporters. “My aim is to adjust our [military] footprint in many places. No decisions have been made.”French Minister of Armed Forces Florence Parly and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper speak during a news conference at the Pentagon in Washington, Jan. 27, 2020.France currently has about 4,500 troops in Africa, taking a lead role in countering terror groups linked to Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaida across the Sahel region.Earlier this month, in response to the death of 13 French soldiers during a combat mission in Mali late last year, France said it would send another 220 troops to the region.And France is not alone in sounding the alarm about the growth of terror groups on the Sahel.A increasing number of Western diplomats have warned that IS, in particular, is using the region to regroup following the loss of its self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq.The concern has run so deep, that during an anti-IS coalition meeting hosted this past November in Washington, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that partner nations were already looking to West Africa and the Sahel as “a preferred, initial area of focus” outside of Syria and Iraq.“We agreed at the working level that West FILE – French President Emmanuel Macron visits French troops in Africa’s Sahel region in Gao, northern Mali, May 19, 2017.”There is a lot of collaboration in terms of logistics but also in terms of intelligence,” Niagale Bagayoko, a lead researcher and chair of the African Security Sector Network, told VOA. “That is one of the reasons why the French are presently eager to see the Americans to stay involved in the continent, in particular.”French officials have also emphasized that while they understand Washington’s desire to rebalance its forces across the world to better confront adversaries like China and Russia, they are not asking for a lot.”It’s a classic case of burden sharing where a limited U.S. support leverages an immesnse effort carried out by France and Europe,” Parly said Monday.Yet despite French officials expressing hope that “good sense” would prevail and that Washington would maintain its support for the French-led counterterror operations, U.S. defense officials have increasingly signaled such help may not be forthcoming.”France has reached out to other European allies. I think it’s time for other European allies to assist, as well, in the region,” Esper told reporters Monday. “That could offset whatever changes we make as we consider next steps in Africa.”VOA’s Salem Solomon contributed to this report.
 
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This week Secretary of State Mike Pompeo heads to London as British officials weigh whether or not to allow Chinese telecom giant Huawei to take part in the country’s buildout of its 5G network.The British government is expected to make the decision Tuesday.  FILE – Signage is seen at the Huawei offices in Reading, Britain, May 2, 2019.A senior U.S. official said the two nations are having “very close” and “very vigorous conversations.” Another official said Britain has not told the U.S. about the final decision.  The U.S. says Huawei could provide China a “back door” for spying, a claim that Huawei rejects.  In a Friday phone call with Johnson, U.S. President Donald Trump told the British Prime Minister that giving Huawei the go-ahead would cause a major rift in transatlantic relations and jeopardize intelligence-sharing between Washington and London.U.S. officials have also voiced frustration with decisions by some European nations to grant Huawei some access in the roll-out of their 5G network.“They announced a toolkit that many of us consider to be inadequate,” a senior U.S. official said, referring to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “no-spy” pact from Huawei as she decided to allow the Chinese telecom company to take part in Germany’s 5G roll-out.Under the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, the U.S. Defense Secretary should brief Congressional defense committees by March 15 on the implementation of a plan for fifth generation information and communications technologies, including steps to work with U.S. allies and partners to protect critical networks and supply chains. 
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Efforts by Venezuelan parliamentary leader Juan Guaido to garner European support to unseat president Nicolas Maduro revealed divisions among EU governments as the United States ramped up pressures on Venezuela last week.It was Guaido’s first European visit since he proclaimed himself Venezuela’s acting president a year ago with support from the United States and most Latin American countries, which have backed repeated uprisings that failed to gain support from Venezuela’s military.Nicolas Maduro’s leftist government has managed to remain in power with security assistance from Cuba, Russia and Iran, according to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who met with Guaido at an Anti-Terrorist Summit in Colombia from where he flew to Europe.While most EU member states have recognized Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president and denounced Maduro’s human rights violations, they have refrained from implementing the type of wider sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump who has left open the use of military force.A U.S. airborne unit has conducted joint exercises with Colombian forces along a border region with Venezuela over recent days, according to the Pentagon. Venezuela’s government claims to have intercepted a U.S. warship near its coast.Since leaving Venezuela, Guaido’s offices in Caracas have been raided and several of his top aides arrested by Venezuelan police officials, who accuse him of violating restrictions they imposed on his travel.The leader of Venezuela’s political opposition Juan Guaido addresses the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 23, 2020.Guaido urged tougher measures against Maduro in personal meetings with European leaders and in an address to the annual world community conference in Davos, Switzerland.German Chancellor Angela Merkel and prime ministers from the Netherlands, Austria and Greece talked briefly with Guaido on the sidelines of the Davos conference, where his staff set up a workshop to promote Venezuela’s reconstruction.”We are confronted with an international criminal conglomerate and we can’t fight it alone,” he told the conference. “We need tools from the international community to bring pressure on the regime from various centers,” he said.Guaido specifically asked officials and bankers gathered in Davos to block Venezuela’s international trade in gold extracted from mines which, he said, Maduro has turned over to key army generals to secure their loyalty.Guaido’s tour got off to a promising start with a surprise welcome from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who received him under the glow of cameras at 10 Downing Street. French President Emmanuel Macron met him more privately at the Elysee Palace.But momentum was lost in Spain, where Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez failed to meet Guaido citing scheduling problems. He instead sent a newly appointed foreign minister to see him away from government premises.The awkwardness was exacerbated by revelations that a chief Spanish minister had secretly met Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, when she stopped at Madrid’s airport on her way to Turkey some days earlier.Conservative opposition leaders accused the government of violating existing EU sanctions that include entry restrictions of Maduro’s top officials. The U.S. State Department also issued a strong protest.Spain is especially important to Venezuela because of its deep economic, political and cultural ties to its former colony. Venezuela’s political leverage has grown recently with the inclusion of members of the far-left party Podemos in Sanchez’s cabinet.Sanchez has advocated a “dialogue” to resolve Venezuela’s crisis and his ex-foreign minister Josep Borrell, who is now EU chief of external affairs, has worked to promote negotiations with Maduro.An  EU communique following a meeting between Guaido and Borrell in Brussels said the two “have signaled the urgent necessity to find a common focus as much between the Venezuelan actors as with the international community which could lead to a significant political process.”  Guaido said in Madrid that EU-backed mediation efforts had been “degraded by the dictatorship” in Bogota, which was using them to “gain time.” 
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Britain’s Prince Andrew has provided “zero cooperation” to the American investigators who want to interview him as part of their sex trafficking probe into Jeffrey Epstein, a U.S. prosecutor said Monday.Speaking at a news conference outside Epstein’s New York mansion, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said prosecutors and the FBI had contacted Andrew’s lawyers and asked to interview him.”To date, Prince Andrew has provided zero cooperation,” said Berman, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan.The Associated Press has asked Buckingham Palace for comment.Andrew announced last year that he was withdrawing from his royal duties amid renewed public attention on a woman’s claim that she had several sexual encounters with the prince at Epstein’s behest, starting when she was 17.FILE – A combination photo of the front-pages of British newspapers on Nov. 21, 2019, headlining the scandal surrounding Britain’s Prince Andrew.Virginia Roberts Giuffre says that after meeting Epstein in Florida in 2000, the millionaire flew her around the world and pressured her into having sex with numerous older men, including Andrew, two senior U.S. politicians, a noted academic, wealthy financiers and the attorney Alan Dershowitz, who is now part of President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team.All of those men have denied the allegations. Epstein killed himself in his jail cell last summer while he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.Giuffre has said she had sex with Andrew three times, including once in London in 2001 at the home of Epstein’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.Andrew and Maxwell have both denied any knowledge that Epstein was sexually abusing teenage girls. In a TV interview last fall, Andrew insisted he was out having pizza with his children on the night Giuffre says they were together in London.U.S. Attorney General William Barr has vowed to aggressively investigate and bring charges against anyone who may have helped Epstein.Andrew, in the statement he released in November announcing his intention to “step back from public duties,” said he regretted his “ill-judged association with Jeffrey Epstein.””Of course, I am willing to help any appropriate law enforcement agency with their investigations, if required,” he wrote.Berman made his remarks about the case during a joint appearance with members of Safe Horizon, a nonprofit victim services agency, to discuss a new New York law that made it easier for people to sue over childhood sexual abuse.He wouldn’t discuss the Epstein investigation in detail but reiterated that the case didn’t end with his death.”Jeffrey Epstein couldn’t have done what he did without the assistance of others, and I can assure you that the investigation is moving forward,” Berman said.Numerous women who said they were sexually abused by Epstein as teenagers have claimed in lawsuits and interviews that he got help recruiting young girls from both Maxwell and several assistants.Giuffre’s lawyers have, for months, been calling on Andrew to agree to be interviewed both by investigators and by the lawyers helping the women with those civil lawsuits.Two guards who were supposed to be monitoring Epstein the night he was found dead have been charged with falsifying the jail’s log books to indicate they were performing checks on prisoners, when they were actually sleeping or browsing the internet.
 
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Greece is pushing back against Turkish demands that it demilitarize 16 Aegean islands. The Turkish government maintains it is defending Turkey’s rights and remains committed to negotiation, but analysts warn Turkey’s increasingly “robust diplomacy” threatens to isolate Ankara and escalate regional tensions.  “Greece does not provoke, does not violate the sovereign rights of others, but it doesn’t like to see its own rights violated,” said Greek Defense Minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos Saturday.FILE – In this June 26, 2019 file photo, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar, center left, arrives to NATO headquarters in Brussels.Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar on Wednesday accused Greece of keeping troops on the islands in violation of the 1936 Treaty of Lausanne, which governs the Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece.  The dispute dates to 1974 when Athens started to militarize the islands off the Turkish coast in response to Turkey’s invasion of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus after a pro-Greek coup.Akar’s focus on the dispute is widely seen as part of a broader policy. “Turkey is asking today for the islands’ demilitarization, when there [is] an incredible historical increase of Turkish jets violating Greek airspace,” said political scientist Cengiz Aktar of the University of Athens.”It’s a message Turkey is an aggressive force in the eastern Mediterranean, and Turkey gives the impression it wants a hot conflict with its neighbor, Greece.”Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses his ruling party’s legislators, in Ankara, Jan. 14, 2020.Last week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan further ratcheted up tensions, announcing that Turkish research ships will be deployed in contested Cypriot waters to search for hydrocarbons.  The discovery of large natural gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean by Israel and Cyprus has unleashed a scramble by regional countries for the fossil fuel.  Ankara accuses Greece and other regional countries of seeking to shut it out of the believed bounty of vast energy reserves.”We won’t let anyone violate our rights in any way. This is not a threat,” said Akar Wednesday, adding, “It’s not a weakness to say that we want good relations with our neighbor.””The strategy that Turkey is following is it should protect its legitimate rights in the Mediterranean,” said former Turkish Ambassador Mithat Rende. “The strategy is to have an equitable solution to the matter. And Turkey has made it clear it’s ready to talk.”The policy of diplomacy, backed by strength, however, appears to be backfiring. Athens is looking to its European Union partners to push back against Ankara.FILE – German Chancellor Angela Merkel attends a weekly cabinet meeting at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Dec. 18, 2019.On Friday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel held talks in Istanbul with Erdogan in a bid to shore up Turkey’s commitment to the migrant deal.Given the EU’s limited ability to rein in Turkey, which has the largest navy and air force in the region, analysts predict further muscle-flexing.”When you enter a policy of confrontation, you can’t step back; you are trapped; otherwise, you look weak,” said Aktar.But the Turkish government could well be calculating, that whatever the outcome of its policy, it will be a win.”I don’t think there will be a military clash,” said Sezer. “But, it’s a risk. It’s a dangerous situation, the longer it goes on. But this would be an opportunity for the government because it will prove to the people all those countries in the region are real threats to Turkey,” he added.
 
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Ale Roque wanders the untamed orchard in Rio de Janeiro, pushing aside leaves to point out what she helped plant last year. “This is cacao, developing well … Look at this lime tree, it’s full … Lots and lots of tomato … That one’s acai …,” she says. It seems there’s always more. “Ginger… Avocado… Pineapple… Sweet potato.”She crouches toward a plump yam, and stops to make a mental note to pick it with the children she’s teaching to garden here and in several other spots in the community. In addition to providing free produce to residents, there’s another benefit: it’s markedly cooler in this blessed shade — a rarity in this part of the city, far from the sea breeze of Copacabana and Ipanema.
The scarce scrap of vacant land is just outside downtown on the slope of Providencia, Rio’s first favela, where working-class homes cram up against one another at slipshod angles and bullet holes attest to the presence of drug traffickers.This Jan.6, 2020 photo, shows an area where trees and plants were gardened by Ale Roque in Rio’s first favela Morro da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.It’s one of dozens of places where people are starting projects to create a greener version of a tree-starved urban landscape that contrasts with the verdant rainforest looming over the city. The activist group Catalytic Communities has mapped sustainable projects across the city, and is trying to foster a support network.
“There seems to be now, all of a sudden, in the last six months even, a growth in interest,” said Theresa Williamson, the group’s executive director.
Roque argues that if kids spend their waking days exposed only to alleys, bullets, empty drug capsules and trash, they’ll struggle to contribute good to the world. They need places to play and pick flowers.
“How are you going teach kids about Mother Nature if they don’t have contact with it?” says Roque, 49. “This could be happening in places all over the world, in other favelas, other little areas.”
Rio is famed for magnificent views of its coastal rainforest’s wild topography. Look outside the postcard, though, and there’s a picture of urban dystopia after decades of slapdash sprawl and government neglect. It’s said even the Christ the Redeemer statue, perched atop a jungle peak near the coast, has his back turned to most of the metropolis.
Whole neighborhoods have severed connections with the forest and, during Rio’s summer, residents feel the lack of greenery in their flesh.
The sun beats with discrimination, sparing leafy neighborhoods that tend to be affluent while punishing expanses of aluminum and asbestos roofs. Rio’s dense neighborhoods have among the least vegetation in Brazil; 80 of them have less than 1% tree cover, most in the industrial North Zone. Without shade or evapotranspiration, so-called “heat islands” make summer even more brutal.
This month, the city’s top temperatures breached 100 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius), but people focus instead on “apparent temperature,” a measure that includes wind and humidity — “sensacao” — that spiked as high as 131 degrees (54.8 degrees C) on Jan. 11, just shy of the record.
In Rio’s North Zone, the Arara Park favela is so packed that a string of one-room shops were built over an open sewage canal. They’re brick kilns under the baking sun. Inside one, a beauty salon, Ingrid Rocha, 20, slouches beneath a whirring ceiling fan with another on the floor. Her air conditioning unit does nothing to cut the heat, so clients only show up after 4 p.m. That means Rocha, who’s pregnant, needs to work more than 12-hour days to hit her targets.
Deeper inside the favela, Luis Cassiano is sitting in a garden atop his home’s roof. As more and more houses cropped up over the last three decades, he felt the temperature rise to a point that became unbearable. The sun would set behind the far-off rainforest, but his home’s interior wouldn’t cool until after midnight.
Online research for a solution led him to install a green roof  — with bromeliads, succulents and a small, flowering quaresmeira tree — and he wants to do the same for neighbors. There’s an aesthetic bonus, too; the favela needs to mix some calming green into the scenery, he says, to offset the angry red of the homes’ bricks and the melancholic grey of their roofs.
So far he’s had few takers, but “if God wills, people will understand that it’s necessary and urgent and it will be a job that will be really useful,” he said, sitting in his rooftop garden just after midday. “I think people will, one day, really wind up joining. We’ll need it. Just look at the heat of all those roofs together!”
The nascent greening from such projects is a break with Rio’s recent past, according to Washington Fajardo, a visiting housing policy researcher at Harvard University. A Paris-inspired policy to plant shade trees fell by the wayside as modernism became Brazil’s reigning aesthetic. Lately, public works have resorted to palm trees that are resilient, but do little to reduce temperatures.
 
“To get a tree to grow in an urban environment requires irrigation, because pollution makes it much harder for a sapling to reach adulthood,”  Fajardo, the prior mayor’s special advisor on urban issues, said by phone from Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We knew how to do that better at the start of the 20th century than we do today, strangely.”
Rio’s public policy for green spaces trails far behind other cities including Seoul, Lisbon, Durban and Medellin, and even Brazilian state capitals like Recife and Belo Horizonte, according to Cecilia Herzog, president of Inverde, an organization that researches green infrastructure and urban ecology. So people are taking matters into their own hands, she added.
The city has begun paying attention. Rio this month started planting native tree species to create 25 “fresh islands” in the city’s West Zone.
Meantime, it’s only getting hotter in Brazil, as in the rest of the world. Its southeast region — where Rio is located — has recorded three of its steamiest five years on record since 2014.
The heat can be felt at a plaza in the Providencia favela, where, though it’s still morning and there’s hilltop wind, Ale Roque uses a towel to dab sweat from her forehead, upper lip and chin. The passion fruit and acelora trees she planted are starting to gain stature. Those and other saplings now receive water from a rudimentary irrigation system.
Later that day, it’ll grow even hotter as she teaches preteens to compost, which will entail lugging more than 10 loads of old soil up two flights of stairs to a home’s back patio.
Why does Roque endure the labor and the heat?
“I want to make the world green!” she says and laughs, then collects herself. “It’s because someone has to do it, truthfully that’s it. Someone has to do it.”    
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ELAZIG, TURKEY — Turkey called off rescue operations on Monday in eastern areas hit by Friday’s earthquake after emergency workers recovered the body of a final person they were searching for in a collapsed building, bringing the death toll to 41, authorities said.The magnitude 6.8 quake caused 37 deaths in Elazig province, about 550 km (340 miles) east of Ankara, and four in neighboring Malatya. More than 1,600 others were hurt, including 86 still being treated in hospitals, though none were in serious condition, the government said.Forty-five people had been rescued from under ruined buildings, Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Authority (AFAD) said.Authorities have warned residents not to enter damaged buildings because of the danger of collapse and further aftershocks, leaving many without a home in a region where temperatures fell to -6C (21F) on Monday morning.Addressing reporters in Elazig, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said the government would provide financial support to those whose homes were damaged. Some 1,000 temporary homes would be built, and some schools and mosques were now being used as shelters, he added.Urbanization Minister Murat Kurum said authorities had started demolishing 22 damaged buildings in Elazig. Construction of some 2,000 new houses in the province was expected to be completed by year end, he added.Turkey has a history of powerful earthquakes. More than 17,000 people were killed in August 1999 when a 7.6 magnitude quake struck Izmit, a city southeast of Istanbul. In 2011, a quake in the eastern city of Van killed more than 500. 
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France hopes “good sense” will prevail and the United States will not slash support for French military operations in West Africa, where groups linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State are expanding their foothold.Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian made the appeal as Defense Minister Florence Parly was due to meet U.S. counterparts on Monday to discuss the crisis in the Sahel, a band of scrubland south of the Sahara.
The Pentagon announced plans last year to withdraw hundreds of military personnel from Africa as it redirects resources to address challenges from China and Russia after two decades focused on counter-terrorism operations. Those cuts could deepen following an ongoing global troop review spearheaded by Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
The possibility has alarmed France, which relies on U.S. intelligence and logistics for its 4,500-strong mission in the Sahel. The deaths of 13 French soldiers in a helicopter crash during a combat mission in Mali in November increased France’s determination to secure more support in the zone.
France believes it is time to increase, not ease, pressure on militants to prevent “Islamic State from rebuilding in the Sahel,” a senior French Defense Ministry official told Reuters.
Parly will put her case on Monday to Esper and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien.
“I hope they will be rational to keep this partnership … and that good sense will prevail,” le Drian told reporters.
The U.S. currently has 6,000 military personnel in Africa.
Although some experts say a repositioning of forces is overdue, many U.S. officials share French concerns about relieving pressure on militants in Africa.
“Any withdrawal or reduction would likely result in a surge in violent extremist attacks on the continent and beyond,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and Democrat Chris Coons wrote in a letter to Esper this month.
Former colonial power France intervened in 2013 to drive back militants who had seized northern Mali the previous year.
Fighters have since regrouped and spread. Over the past year, militants have stepped up attacks in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.
Although groups in the Sahel are believed to have the intent to carry out attacks against the United States, they are not currently believed to have the capacity to do so, officials say.Scrambling drones
General Francois Lecointre, chief of staff of the French armed forces, told Reuters that the loss of U.S. intelligence from intercepted communications would be the “biggest setback.”
“I’m doing my utmost to prevent this from happening,” he said, adding that French drone-based spying systems would not be operational until year-end.
France said this month it would deploy 220 additional troops to the region, despite rising anti-French sentiment in some countries and criticism at home that its forces are bogged down.
Parly recently visited the Sahel with counterparts from Portugal, Sweden and Estonia to press European allies to do more, especially by contributing special forces to a new French-led unit due to be set up this year.
One of the main aims of the outfit, officials said, is to improve coordination between regional troops and French planes able to carry out air strikes.
So far, take-up has been limited with only Estonia committing 40 troops, while discussions continue with eight nations. Germany has refused to take part.
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Consider the places that best prepare their students for the future and what comes to mind are nations such as Finland and South Korea, which are famous the world over for their education systems. However these are also fairly high income nations. What happens when educational performance is adjusted for different income levels? Then developing nations like in Southeast Asia do very well on international rankings, according to a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit. The findings suggest that although these nations have less money, they extract more value from every dollar spent on education than many of their rich peers.The 2019 Worldwide Educating for the Future Index analyzes education based on three criteria: state policy, teaching conditions, and the general socioeconomic context. For the second year running, Finland led the top 10 nations, which also included Canada, New Zealand, and Singapore. However the places shift when national income is taken into consideration.Poorer Nations can Establish Good Schools“The results are striking,” said the report released this month.“When scores are adjusted, half of the original top 10 relinquish their places to middle- and low-income countries — the Philippines, Ghana, Mexico, Vietnam and Indonesia. It suggests that the latter are putting their more limited resources to good use in advancing a future skills agenda.”Rich Nations still leadIf governments had unlimited money, they probably could improve education systems. But they don’t, so the index findings are significant because they offer hope that education can be improved through other means.However the role of money was unavoidable. Just as rich students can afford tutors and other advantages, the EIU said rich nations tended to perform better on the index, saying, “the wealthier an economy, the more likely it is to rank in the upper half.”Myanmar for instance is one of the newer emerging economies. Kyaw Moe Tun, founder and executive director of the Parami Institute of Liberal Arts in Yangon, said the nation wants “a world-class higher education system.”Efforts “are going to take a lot of time, and we don’t have enough resources to implement them,” he said in the report.  Doing more with  LessFor those with more limited resources there are other means to improve education, said the EIU, a research division of the Economist Group. It said “the need to develop future skills like critical thinking, creativity, entrepreneurship, and analysis is more vital than ever given the continuing advances in technology and artificial intelligence.”Those future skills should be incorporated into national education strategies, the report said.Brazil and other nations, for instance, make these skills an official priority in their education policies and conduct regularly scheduled reviews of the policies to ensure they keep up with the times.Changing Education GoalsOther recommendations include promoting classroom access to technology, career counselors, extracurricular learning options, and the principle of lifelong learning, that people will have to keep adapting their skills long after they graduate.Microsoft vice president of worldwide education Anthony Salcito said it’s good that government and school officials are talking, but it’s not enough.“There’s a misunderstanding that what we need to do is get students technology skills, whereas what we need are students who understand how to unleash their human skills in a world of technology,” he said in the report.The benefits go beyond education and jobs, Georgia McCafferty, EIU managing editor for thought leadership, said.She suggested education promotes global values, such as respect for civil liberties and tolerance of religious diversity.”The recent rise of nativism and populism in some quarters of the world, along with a rejection of globalization,” she said, “makes the need for students [to] develop future-oriented skills like critical thinking and analysis even more urgent.”
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U.S. President Donald Trump has warned British Prime Minister Boris Johnson of “serious consequences” if he allows the Chinese telecom giant Huawei a role in building Britain’s 5G phone network, according to officials on both sides of the Atlantic.The warning follows months of lobbying of Downing Street by top U.S. officials who aim to persuade the British government to shut out the Chinese company on security grounds.Trump told Johnson Friday that giving Huawei, which has ties to Chinese intelligence agencies, the go-ahead will cause a major rift in transatlantic relations and jeopardize intelligence-sharing between Washington and London, according to U.S. officials. They say the decision, expected Tuesday, will also likely impact the prospects for a post-Brexit transatlantic trade deal eagerly sought by Britain to compensate for likely diminished trade with the European Union.U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Saturday dubbed the Huawei deal a threat to “critical” infrastructure. But he indicated that if Downing Street falls into line, the U.S. will “dedicate a lot of resources” to getting a trade deal negotiated and signed by the end of the year.
The Huawei decision is also being watched closely on Capitol Hill.In an unprecedented move, three Republican senators — Tom Cotton, John Cornyn and Marco Rubio — sent a letter to Britain’s National Security Council urging Huawei to be excluded from 5G development. “The company’s actions show a clear record of predatory and problematic behavior,” the senators said, adding it would “in the best interest of the United Kingdom, the US-UK special relationship, and the health and wellbeing of a well-functioning market for 5G technologies to exclude Huawei.”FILE – Signage is seen at the Huawei offices in Reading, Britain, May 2, 2019.US sees Trojan horseFor a year, the Trump administration has been urging Britain to ban the Chinese company from participating in the development of Britain’s fifth-generation wireless network. U.S. officials say there’s a significant risk that the Chinese telecoms giant will act as a Trojan horse for Beijing’s espionage agencies, planting ‘backdoors’ into any equipment supplied to Britain, enabling data to be swept up and intelligence gathered. The U.S. imposed its own trade restrictions on Huawei last year.Huawei vehemently denies that it could be used by Beijing for intelligence purposes, saying that U.S. allegations are “baseless speculation.” The Chinese government says Huawei is a private company and poses no security risk to the West.But Beijing has also made ill-disguised threats, suggesting a decision to ban Huawei could result in Britain being punished when it comes to Chinese trade and investment. Similar warnings have been issued to other Western countries, all of which have been urged by U.S. officials to shun Huawei on security grounds.U.S. lobbying has been especially fierce among members of the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence-sharing pact — the U.S.-led Anglophone intelligence arrangement linking Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Britain. Australia and New Zealand, although as yet not Canada, have banned Huawei from any role in developing their 5G networks. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is due to make a last effort to dissuade Johnson during a visit to London this week.In Germany, the Huawei issue has sparked a major division between Chancellor Angel Merkel, who fears Chinese retaliation if Huawei is excluded, and her coalition partners, the Social Democrats, who are opposed to offering Huawei any 5G role. Merkel’s ministries are also deeply split, with the trade and finance ministers backing Huawei’s involvement and foreign and intelligence officials highly skeptical that the risks are worth it.Both the White House and Downing Street have sought to play down talk of a transatlantic rift. In a bland statement Friday, the White House said Trump and Johnson “discussed important regional and bilateral issues, including working together to ensure the security of our telecommunications networks.”FILE – People attend a Huawei Mate20 smartphone series launch event in London, Britain, Oct. 16, 2018.’Next Chinese virus’A Downing Street spokeswoman said: “The prime minister spoke to president Trump. They discussed a range of issues, including cooperation to ensure the security of our telecommunications networks.”But behind the scenes, the lobbying has been furious and the issue risks splitting the British cabinet, with several ministers determined to block Huawei, fearing the damage that could be done to Britain’s so-called special relationship with the U.S.The crescendo of the U.S. anti-Huawei campaign has been mirrored in London as it emerged last week that Johnson appeared set to give Huawei the green light, discounting U.S. alarm and prompting growing unease among his own Conservative lawmakers. Some have likened the political damage Huawei is causing to the coronavirus epidemic threatening to spread to the West, saying it is the “next Chinese virus.”If Johnson does give the go-ahead, it would confirm a ‘provisional’ decision made by his predecessor in Downing Street, Theresa May. Last year, she said Huawei should be allowed to build some so-called ‘non-core’ parts of Britain’s future 5G data network.U.S. intelligence officials and their counterparts at Britain’s GCHQ, the eavesdropping spy agency and the country’s largest intelligence service, say restricting Huawei to the non-core ‘edges’ of the new network would make little difference to the security risk.Johnson has come under pressure from British telecom providers and mobile phone companies, which have already been installing Huawei technology to start setting up the new network. They have warned that Huawei offers more advanced, better integrated and cheaper equipment than its commercial rivals, and banning the company would delay the rollout of 5G, costing the British economy billions of pounds. 
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New reports from Transparency International and the Russian Academy of Sciences on education highlight a pervasive culture of corruption in Russia that persists despite efforts by the government and opposition activists.The country scored 137th out of 180 countries in the FILE – Students walk outside the main building of Moscow State University, in Moscow, Russia, Feb. 10, 2015.According to FILE – Russian President Vladimir Putin (C) speaks during an annual televised call-in show in Moscow, Russia, June 20, 2019.”Where does the money go? To public revenue, to be sure,” Putin added when asked about common bribes. “Of course, officials, and representatives of law enforcement in particular,” he added.While corruption’s full economic effects are difficult to calculate, conservative government estimates put the cost of corruption at $2.5 billion from 2014 to 2017.Entrepreneur’s Rights Commissioner Boris Titov has labeled the issue the “biggest problem” facing Russian entrepreneurial growth.Yet Putin has insisted harsher punishments and “uncompromising efforts” are changing the tide.Among Putin measures lauded by outside experts are e-governance efforts and a public blacklist of government officials fired over a “loss of confidence.”State media portray Putin as something of an anti-corruption folk hero, seemingly alone trying to rein in Russia’s vast network of amoral civil servants.FILE – Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny gestures as a security officer guards an entrance of his Anti-Corruption Foundation during a raid of its offices, in Moscow, Russia, Dec. 26, 2019.”A real fight against corruption is impossible under Putin. His whole system is built around it,” the organization’s spokesperson Lyubov Sobol told VOA. “Every attempt to really take on corrupt officials has ended in nothing,” she said.Secret European villas, wealthy relatives, and private planes ferrying pet corgies to international dog shows have all been subjects of the foundation’s video investigations in recent years. Another alleges to have uncovered the secret wealth of former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and garnered over 33 million YouTube views.The revelations set off a series of nationwide protests last year and may have played a role in Medvedev’s dismissal in Putin’s Kremlin shakeup last week.FBK was also quick to note that Medvedev replacement Mikhail Mishustin has family holdings that far outstrip his past government salary as Russia’s chief tax officer.Meanwhile, the Kremlin has launched raids and criminal investigations against FBK, moves widely seen as revenge for the organization’s investigations and calls for democratic change.A poll last year by the independent Levada Center found most Russians view anti-corruption crackdowns as aimed at settling political scores.Sobol said the solution is independent judges and a reformed police force, but added, “for that you need political will.”
 
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Right-wing opposition leader Matteo Salvini is telling Italians who are voting in two regions to use their ballots to help his anti-migrant party return to national power.
Voting began Sunday morning in Emilia-Romagna, a northern region where the left-wing has held power for decades, and in Calabria, in the south, an area Salvini’s League party once disparaged as unproductive but where it now wants to expand a foothold .
Results, expected early Monday, of the voting for governor and regional legislatures could rock Italy’s squabbling central government in Rome.
Salvini is demanding an early election to end Premier Giuseppe Conte’s coalition government, whose junior partner is the center-left Democrats. If the Democratic Party’s incumbent governor in Emilia-Romagna loses to the League’s candidate on Sunday, the bickering among Conte’s coalition partners could worsen and jeopardize the nearly 5-month-old government’s survival.
The senior party in Conte’s government is the populist 5-Star Movement, which itself is so plagued by infighting and defections that its political leader resigned his post last week.
Salvini in a Facebook post urged Italians as they headed to vote Sunday to “liberate these splendid regions” from the Democrats and “Let’s free the entire country.”
Salvini, who in Conte’s previous government took a hard line against immigration, lost his role as deputy premier and interior minister last year and his right-wing party lost its place in government when he yanked his support from Conte in a failed bid for an early election that Salvini had hoped with make him premier.
Conte then formed a new government with the Democrats, who set aside their deep rivalries with the 5-Stars to replace the League in the national coalition.
Voters could be forgiven if they had the impression Salvini himself was running to be governor of Emilia-Romagna. The League leader campaigned practically daily in the region, especially in the countryside and small towns, considered ripe for a shift toward the right. With his “Italians first” mantra, Salvini dashed from rally to rally, sampling local agricultural products in the region, which is one of Italy’s wealthiest and most productive. He boasted of how, when he was interior minister, fewer migrants, trafficked by Libya-based smugglers, arrived in Italy aboard charity rescue boats.
Opinion polls during the campaign indicated the race for governorship was neck-to-neck.
The League’s candidate is Lucia Borgonzoni, a League politician who as undersecretary for culture in Conte’s first government distinguished herself mainly for complaining that the Louvre in Paris was getting too many loans of Leonardo da Vinci’s artworks for an exhibition to mark the 500th anniversary of the Italian Renaissance master’s death.
The Democrats’ candidate is Gov. Stefano Bonacconi, under whose leadership the region’s reputation for a well-run health care system and other local services was reinforced.
But Salvini is banking on voters in Emilia-Romagna viewing Sunday’s ballot as a referendum on Conte’s government and a chance to boost his League’s fortunes. The right-wing League has consistently scored as Italy’s most popular party nationwide in recent opinion polls.
Conte says the outcome of Sunday’s votes won’t affect his determination to continue governing until the next election for Parliament is due in 2023.
Until recent years, the League’s profile was as a northern-based political power, with its leaders depicting the underdeveloped south as a parasitic drain on taxpayers’ money.
But Salvini revamped the image of the League, which had long been called the Northern League, into a nationwide force with rhetoric that blames migrants for crime and the European Union for what he says is infringement on Italy’s sovereignty.
His chief ally, the Brothers of Italy, has its roots in neo-fascism and is growing quickly in popularity.  
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