Month: January 2018

Scientists have reconstructed the face of a 9,000-year-old Greek teenager, shining a new light on life in a period known as the dawn of civilization. Faith Lapidus reports.
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Relentless rain in Paris has authorities scrambling to safeguard residents in France’s capital. They suspended river traffic Wednesday and closed several rail stations as water in the Seine River keeps rising. Several people died in similar flooding in 2016, and the flood damage cost about 1 billion euros. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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Macedonia Prime Minister Zoran Zaev took a big step Wednesday in resolving a longtime dispute with neighboring Greece over the name Macedonia.

Zaev said his country would change the name of Alexander the Great Airport in the capital, Skopje.

Alexander the Great was the ancient Greek king who ruled the northern Greek territory also named Macedonia. Another country’s use of his name has been a major irritant for many Greeks.

“To demonstrate, in practice, that we are committed to finding a solution, I am announcing that we will change the name of the airport and avenues,” Zaev said in Davos, Switzerland, referring to a north-south highway also named for the Greek hero.

“We don’t want to just solve the issue of the name, but to put the relations of our two countries on solid foundations,” Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said after meeting with Zaev in Davos.

Feud over name

Greece and Macedonia have been feuding over who gets to use the name since Macedonia became independent from Yugoslavia in 1991.

Many Greeks say allowing the neighboring country to use the name insults Greek history and implies a claim on Greek territory.

Greece has blocked Macedonian efforts to join the European Union and NATO because of the name dispute.

The United Nations has been struggling to negotiate a settlement for more than 20 years. Lead negotiator Matthew Nimetz said last week that he was “very hopeful” a settlement was near.

The country of Macedonia is officially known at the U.N. as the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
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Russia tightened its so-called “foreign agent” law last month to target overseas media operating in the country. It means the government can require media outlets to state that they are “foreign agents.” They also have to submit to intensive scrutiny of staffing and financing. Voice of America is among the media organizations to receive such a designation. 

Similar legislation was introduced in 2012 against civil society and non-governmental groups that receive any type of foreign financial support.

The human rights group Memorial has long been targeted for its efforts at documenting historical crimes in the Soviet era, as well as modern-day rights abuses. It was founded in the late 1980s by political dissidents, including the late Russian nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov.

Memorial was designated a foreign agent in 2015 — accused of receiving funds from the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy and the European Commission, among others. The designation has seen a big increase in workload for the group’s legal director, Kirill Koroteev.

“The most significant problem is that we have to spend a great deal of time in court. We have to spend a lot of time defending ourselves, because we are under the tight control of the state. And that means that even the smallest possible fault, the way the state sees it, leads to a fine or a threat to be eliminated,” Koroteev told VOA in a recent interview.

WATCH: Henry Ridgwell’s report from Moscow

For many of those who fall foul of the designation, the law has echoes of Stalin-era denunciations of alleged anti-Soviet spies. Koroteev says even the term foreign agent appears to be copied from those times.

“This particular expression itself, let us say, is undoubtedly borrowed from the “Great Terror” period. Someone could just open any reasonable book on history, or even a dictionary of the Russian language. That is why the parallel is quite evident.”

The organization Levada conducts social research and polling, aiming to gain an insight into Russian public opinion. But it, too, has also been designated a foreign agent and banned from operating during Russia’s upcoming election campaign season.

“Nobody is going to try to find out for themselves what the foreign money was used for — it does not matter. The most important thing is that the label was attached. Then, that makes it seem there is something murky. That label means one works for foreigners, and if he works for foreigners, that means he is against Russia,” says Levada’s Denis Volkov.

Russia’s government says the foreign agent law is aimed at stopping nefarious foreign interference in Russian politics. On the streets of Moscow, few wanted to discuss the topic. Those who did voiced support for the government.

“I stand for everything in the national interest, everything that is for us. That pleases me. Maybe I am a patriot, but I think that we shall survive without all those foreign things,” Moscow resident Larisa told VOA.

In its latest report for 2018, the group Human Rights Watch says the foreign agent law has had a chilling effect: By September 2017, Russia had designated 158 groups as foreign agents, and courts had levied crippling fines for those failing to comply. They estimate that approximately 30 civil society groups have shut down.
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Syria and Russia on Wednesday accused the United States of lying about chemical weapons attacks in the Syrian conflict as a way of derailing efforts to bring an end to the fighting.

Syria’s state-run SANA news agency carried comments from a Foreign Ministry source condemning what it called “lies and allegations” by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the Interfax news agency that whenever peace efforts advance, the United States promotes “rigged, unverified reports” of chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

Those comments came a day after the United States joined its NATO allies in launching a pressure campaign against the use of chemical weapons in Syria, while singling out Russia for protecting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

“The recent attacks in East Ghouta raise serious concerns that Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime might be continuing its use of chemical weapons against its own people,” Tillerson said at a Paris conference hosted by Le Drian.

Tillerson said at least 20 people were killed Monday in an apparent chlorine gas attack in rebel-held East Ghouta, near Damascus.

“Whoever conducted the attacks, Russia ultimately bears responsibility for the victims in East Ghouta and countless other Syrians targeted with chemical weapons since Russia became involved in Syria,” he said.

Tillerson, along with foreign ministers from France, Germany and Turkey, were among those who launched the International Partnership Against Impunity for Use of Chemical Weapons on Tuesday. More than two dozen like-minded nations endorsed a political commitment to share information on combating the use of chemical weapons worldwide.

The U.S. secretary of state noted Russia’s failure to resolve the chemical weapons issue in Syria calls into question its commitment to the resolution of the overall crisis.

“At a very minimum, Russia must stop vetoing and at least abstain from future security council votes on this issue,” Tillerson said.

In November, Russia vetoed the renewal of an independent and technical group created by the U.N. Security Council, the so-called Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM), to look into the perpetrators of chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

“When Russia killed the JIM, they sent a dangerous message to the world — one that not only said chemical weapons use is acceptable but also that those who use chemical weapons don’t need to be identified or held accountable,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said in a statement Tuesday.

Concern about Turkey’s Afrin offensive

Turkey’s offensive in the northern Syrian enclave of Afrin was also a focus of Tuesday’s talks in Paris, with Tillerson meeting with his Turkish counterpart, Mevlut Cavusoglu. A day earlier, during remarks in London, the top U.S. diplomat said the United States is “concerned” about the offensive against U.S.-backed Kurdish YPG fighters in Syria.

Turkish forces intensified military operations on Monday to push the Kurdish militia out of the Afrin area.

The Turkish operation is aimed at ousting from Afrin the Syrian Kurdish group that has controlled territory in northern Syria and proven effective in the U.S.-coalition-led fight against Islamic State militants.

Turkey considers the YPG to be a terrorist organization associated with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK, which has fought for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey.

French Foreign Minister Le Drian on Tuesday joined Tillerson in expressing his concern about Turkey’s military operation in Afrin.

“I had the opportunity to tell my Turkish colleague that this offensive worries us,” Le Drian said.

“While we understand the concerns Turkey has about border security, we cannot but call on Turkey to show the greatest level restraint on this issue,” the French foreign minister added.

Turkey’s shelling into Afrin came after the U.S.-led coalition said it would form a 30,000-strong Kurdish-led border security force in northern Syria.

Washington later said the effort had been mischaracterized and that the United States was not creating a border force, but that the coalition would provide security to liberated areas, blocking escape routes for Islamic State militants.
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Four helicopters were evacuating some 100 tourists and hotel workers from a four-star mountainside hotel and a nearby guesthouse in northern Italy after an avalanche overnight, civil protection authorities said Tuesday as heavy snow caused disruption across the Alps.

The Langtauferer Hotel, located near the Austrian border at 1,870 meters (6,135 feet) above sea level and some 100 kilometers (about 60 kilometers) northwest of Bolzano, was not directly hit, but was in an area of extremely high risk for further avalanches, said Katia Squeo of the civil protection agency in Bolzano.

“The electricity was restored and the guests didn’t want to go, so the mayor ordered the evacuation,” Squeo said. “The avalanche risk is still present.”

The evacuation was taking place under clear conditions, with each helicopter ferrying seven people at a time to a school gymnasium in nearby San Valentino, where they were being fed and looked after.

A nearby guesthouse was also evacuated, and the whole village was cut off from the nearest major road, some 20 kilometers away, by the heavy snowfall and avalanche risk.

The whole northern crest of the Alps bordering Austria was under the highest avalanche risk following an extraordinary snowfall of up to two meters (6.6 feet,) beating record levels dating to the early 1980s in some places, officials said.

The Langtauferer hotel boasts views of a 3,700-meter summit and advertises itself as being ideal for skiers, who can start their runs right outside the hotel door. Martina Doene, the hotel’s manager, said the evacuees remained calm.

The civil protection agency said teams also were working to open roads to Val Senales, where thousands of tourists and residents had been isolated since Monday above Merano. The town itself was protected by avalanche barriers and they were at no immediate risk, Squeo said.

Heavy snow has created dangerous conditions and disrupted transport across the Alps.

In France, the Chamonix ski area at the foot of Mont Blanc was closed due to what officials said was the highest avalanche risk. Several major roads and tunnels in the area were shut down.

In Switzerland, a highway leading to the Gotthard tunnel toward Italy was shut. Swiss public broadcaster SRF reported that the A2 highway near Gurtnellen was hit by an avalanche and was temporarily closed in both directions.

The Swiss ski resorts of Zermatt, Andermatt and Saas-Fee are cut off from the outside world due to the risk of avalanches.

Heavy snowfall has also hampered the arrival of participants at the annual World Economic Forum in the Swiss town of Davos.

Schools in some cut-off villages in Austria’s western state of Tyrol remained closed Tuesday, according to Austrian broadcaster ORF.

 
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For the thousands of Syrian rebels fighting alongside Turkish forces in northern Syria this week in a military offensive Ankara has called Operation Olive Branch, each village retaken from Kurdish militiamen is payback for what they see as the Kurds’ betrayal of the rebellion against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Ankara says the goal of its intervention, launched Saturday, is to create a safe zone 30 kilometers wide to protect its borders from Syrian Kurdish separatists, whom Turkey dubs “terrorists” and says they’re tied to its outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has been waging an insurgency in the southeast for decades.

The broader Turkish aims, say analysts, is to try to drive a wedge between the United States and People’s Protection Units, the Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG, a key ally of Washington in the battle against Islamic State. The Turkish government sees the YPG as an offshoot of the PKK.

But the participation of Syrian rebels in the Turkish offensive has a strongly personal element, one of revenge.

Many of the rebels aligned with Turkey come from rural northern Syria. They see the battle to wrest control of the northern Kurdish enclave of Afrin and outlying Arab villages as vengeance for the coordination they allege took place in February 2016 between the YPG and Russian-backed forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in an offensive to encircle Aleppo.

That offensive saw the YPG grab the opportunity to seize a string of Arab villages and towns in northern Syria to the southeast of Afrin, including traditionally Arab Tell Rifaat.

“The problem is not only that the Kurdish fighters cooperated with the Syrian regime and the Russians during the battle for Aleppo, but that the YPG burned dozens of Arab villages and displaced their inhabitants,” Gen. Salim Idris, a former rebel chief of staff, told VOA.

The loss of Tell Rifaat was a calamity for Syrian rebels, depriving them of the chance to establish a defensive line.

Revenge by many factions

And it was seen by Turkey-based Free Syrian Army (FSA) insurgents battling Assad as a stab in the back by the YPG, one they vowed they would get even for.

Now, they say, their time has come.

“The goal of the Free Syrian Army is to regain 16 Arab towns and villages occupied by the YPG” in 2016, said Major Yasser Abdul Rahim, the commander of Failaq al Sham, a rebel militia.

The Turkish offensive has the support, too, of the Syrian rebels’ main political organization, the Syrian Coalition, which says it is backing Ankara’s intervention. The coalition is urging YPG militiamen to “pull out of the towns and villages they occupied and from which they displaced their residents.”

Turkey’s operation highlights the tangled mess that northern Syria has become with its dizzying array of sectarian and ideological groups, all claiming right is on their side, eager to extract revenge for the bloodletting.

There seems no end in sight to the war in Syria: micro-conflicts proliferate, aggravated partly by outside powers, with friend becoming foe, and foe turning into a temporary ally in an instant.

Russian approval

International reaction to Turkey’s intervention illustrates the complexity of interests involved.

Russia appears tacitly to have blessed Ankara’s move. In the days leading up to Operation Olive Branch, it moved Russian military advisers out of Afrin. On Monday, Turkish President President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, “We have discussed it with the Russians and we have an agreement with them.”

The Kurds accuse Damascus, which has formally denounced the Turkish intervention, and Moscow, of having struck a bargain with Erdogan, in which the Turkish leader will ignore an Assad offensive on nearby Idlib, the last remaining Syrian province in rebel hands, while they will give Turkey free rein in Afrin to punish the Kurds.

NATO

Meanwhile, Turkey’s NATO allies appear divided over whether to rebuke Ankara for the offensive.

U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis warns Turkey’s offensive against the U.S.-allied YPG distracts from efforts to ensure the final defeat of IS and cautioned that jihadists would exploit it.

In a statement Monday, British Prime Minister Theresa May’s office said, “We are closely following developments in Afrin in northwestern Syria. We recognize that Turkey has a legitimate interest in the security of its borders.”

The Turkish intervention comes just weeks after Washington said it planned to shape, train and arm a mainly Kurdish manned border force to help stabilize northern Syria — a move Turkey has denounced, saying it feared such a force could be used to help the Kurds form an autonomous region in a swathe of land along its border.
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Russian hacking operations to support Catalonian independence are continuing and could intensify, according to a report published this week by the Center for Strategic and Defense Studies, CESEDEN, a Spanish Defense Ministry think tank.

The report claims Russia is destabilizing Spain as tensions escalate in the rebellious northeastern region.

“The Kremlin is taking advantage of the Catalan crisis to destabilize, employing a policy intended to generate confusion in the social media,” the report said.

While Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy hoped the elections he called in the region last month would defuse tensions, they instead returned the pro-independence majority to the regional parliament. This week, the pro-independence majority continued to defy Madrid by nominating exiled leader Carles Puigdemont as president.

Suspicions of Russian meddling in Catalonia have been voiced by Spanish defense minister Maria Dolores Cospedal, as well as EU and NATO analysts.

Although Cospedal has been reluctant to blame Russia directly, she said last November that her government was analyzing how thousands of robot accounts supporting Catalonia’s independence operated from Russia.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has accused Spain of trying to “blame Russia for its internal weaknesses.”

But a 2,000 percent increase in social media traffic has been detected since a referendum and subsequent declaration of independence by the Catalan parliament late last year. The moves triggered the imposition of direct rule by the Spanish government, which issued an order of arrest for Puigdemont.

Indirect target: NATO

Spain’s Defense Ministry has said it agrees with the CESEDEN report’s conclusions in a section titled “Impact of Geopolitical Dynamics on Spain.” The report’s author, University of Barcelona political scientist Josep Basques, said Russia was using Spain’s unrest to weaken NATO.

“Moscow does not have specific interests in Spain, as it’s too far from its area of influence. But Moscow aspires to foment problems in Catalonia as a way of debilitating a member of NATO,” he said. Basques warned that the strategy could be repeated in other European countries with secessionist minorities.

A NATO specialist in cyber warfare who testified before Spanish congressional hearings says the Kremlin’s investment in cyber operations targeting Spain represent a tiny fraction of the estimated $1 billion Moscow spends in official and unofficial media outlets.

‘Troll farm’ at work

Much of the pro-secessionist social media traffic has been traced to a Russian “ troll farm” operating from a building on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. A company called Internet Research is housed in the building, which is owned by Evgeny Prigozhin, a close business associate of Russian president Vlaldimir Putin.

IR employs dozens of hackers, bloggers and writers to disseminate fake news and articles favorable to the Kremlin, according to former employees who have talked to the western press and describe an operation resembling a boiler-room scheme.

“They are capable of putting out any type of news, commentary and opinion extremely quickly,” said Spanish cybersecurity expert Manuel Huerta. “They try to create a trend by following each other and attracting real profiles, whose following they enhance for further impact.”

Ukranian cyberanalyst Katrin Palanska has said that IR also targets Ukraine and Baltic states where Moscow is supporting pro-Russian separatists. Russian cyberattacks have reached highly intense levels and have even involved attempts to commandeer Ukraine’s electrical grid and government records, according to Palanska.

Anti-independence journalists in Catalonia say their websites and email accounts have been systematically hacked from electronic dominions in Russia.

Eric Encinas, publisher of a digital magazine, showed VOA a Post Office Protocol (POP3) Google notification received last week of “unusual detected activity” in his hotmail account that was traced to a location in Russia. There was a similar attempt to hack his gmail account last month from Ekaterimburg, where the IR troll farm is located.

Venezuela involved

Over 30 percent of robot accounts supporting Catalonian independence also originated in Venezuela, according to Spanish defense spokesmen. Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, a close Russian ally, has attacked Rajoy for supporting opposition to his government.

Accounts such as #VenezuelaSalutesCatalunya have boosted messages calling Rajoy a “brutal dictator” and urging Catalans to “resist.”

Social media narratives may yet have influence in Catalonia, where the exiled Puigdemont plans to govern “telematically.” His supporters in the Catalan parliament plan to inaugurate him by Skype.

Oriol Soler, a close media adviser to Puigdemont, has met with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whose Russian connections were highlighted by his role in the social media campaign against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. elections.

Assange has generated 40,000 tweets in support of Catalan independence since meeting with Soler last November.

Soler said he met Assange at Ecuador’s embassy in London to discuss a digital publishing project.

 
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German and French lawmakers approved a joint resolution Monday stressing the need for closer cooperation as the two nations mark the 55th anniversary of the signing of the Elysee friendship treaty.

At a special German parliamentary session in Berlin, French National Assembly President Francois de Rugy told lawmakers that multilateralism “is the secret of success of Europe.”

“Strengthening of the cooperation between our two countries is a precondition for strengthening Europe,” he said.

The 1963 Elysee treaty marked the post-World War II reconciliation between France and Germany. In approving the joint Franco-German resolution acknowledging the treaty’s importance, German lawmakers called for a new accord to “deepen” the partnership. 

Later in the day, German lawmakers led by Bundestag speaker Wolfgang Schaeuble participated in a French parliament session in Paris.

Schaeuble said in a speech to French lawmakers at the National Assembly that “the Franco-German cooperation is a success story.” 

“Neither Germany nor France have a future without Europe,” Schaeuble insisted in a speech delivered entirely in French.

German and French lawmakers decided to pass the resolution asking their governments to “adapt the founding principles of the Elysee Treaty” to meet the new challenges of globalization, he said.

Schaeuble listed world migration, “the dangers of international terrorism,” armed conflicts at Europe’s external borders, pressure from authoritarian regimes and separatist aspirations and the evolution of international financial markets as among those challenges. 

French lawmakers then voted 133-12, with two abstentions, to approve the resolution passed by their German counterparts earlier. 
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The global economy and geopolitical tensions are taking a back seat to a more immediate problem at this year’s Davos summit of political and business leaders: heavy snow is burying the venue.

High in the Swiss alps on Monday, on the eve of the opening sessions, many of the roughly 3,000 delegates struggled to reach the ski resort. Part of the main train line into Davos had been buried in snow over the weekend, forcing people onto buses, and helicopters were disrupted by poor visibility.

Some pre-summit meetings were cancelled or delayed as the first waves of delegates waded through snow-blanketed streets with luggage, looking for their hotels, or had to wait for road crews to dig their limousines out of drifts.

Businessmen slipped over on icy patches as snow plows roamed the streets, with the snow returning as fast as the machines could clear it.

World Economic Forum communications chief Adrian Monck said it appeared to be the heaviest snowfall for the four-decades-old summit since 1999-2000, though he described it as more of an inconvenience than a real threat to attendance.

“We know the snow causes inconvenience and it puts a lot of pressure on the city of Davos as a host but so far we have not seen any drop-off in registrations,” Monck said.

With the weather forecast to clear on Tuesday, organizers are hoping transport will start to operate more smoothly and will be running without a hitch by the time U.S. President Donald Trump arrives on Friday to give the closing address.

However, so much snow has built up on the slopes surrounding Davos that avalanches remain a danger.

A bulletin from the SLF Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos showed a broad band of the mountainous country under Level 5 avalanche danger, the highest on a 1-5 scale.

“Fresh snow and snow drift accumulations are prone to triggering (avalanches). Until late in the night a large number of natural avalanches are to be expected,” it said.

Local officials said on Monday they had evacuated two dozen residents from vulnerable areas while crews used explosives to reduce dangerous build-ups on some slopes above the town.

“When Trump comes on Friday it is far from obvious whether he will be able to use a fleet of large helicopters to land in Davos,” said a source close to the organising committee. “Large helicopters increase the risk of avalanches.”
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France’s prime minister on Monday renewed a push to tempt bankers to Paris after Britain leaves the European Union by pledging to temporarily exempt expats from paying into state pension schemes and making more places available in bilingual schools.

France has already announced measures to cut labor costs to make Paris more attractive to the banking sector post-Brexit following the election of President Emmanuel Macron, who has made labor rules more flexible and cut wealth tax.

Now EU expatriates in France will be able to opt out of compulsory contributions to the state pension scheme which make up about 2.3 percent of an employee’s gross salary.

Prime Minister Edouard Philippe told investors that there would be 1,000 places available in the Paris region’s multilingual schools next September, while three new multilingual high schools would be created by 2021.

France would also be ready to handle disputes over financial contracts governed by British law in March with new international sections at the Paris Commercial Court and the Paris Court of Appeal, Paris Europlace financial lobby said in a statement.

“The Paris financial center now has strong momentum to welcome companies and international investors and strengthen its leading position in post-Brexit Europe,” Gerard Mestrallet, the head of the Paris Europlace financial lobby said in a statement.

The announcement came at a highly-publicized summit on Monday of global CEOs — including Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein and JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon — in Versailles, where the prime minister explained French reforms, in English, over lunch.

Macron is expected to join the more than 140 CEOs in the evening, after unveiling a 300-million-euro investment by Japanese carmaker Toyota in northern France.
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