Month: March 2018

A fire at a shopping mall in a Siberian city killed at least 48 people, Russian officials said Monday.

At least 16 people were still missing, state news agency Tass reported, citing Russian Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov.

The fire at the four-story Winter Cherry mall in Kemerovo was extinguished in the morning after burning through the night. Parts of the building were still smoldering and the floors of the cinema hall had caved in in places, another emergency official said.

“More bodies were discovered during the inspection of the scene and we confirm the death toll is at 48,” Deputy Emergencies Minister Vladlen Aksyonov said, according to Tass.

The news agency had earlier reported that 11 of the bodies had been found in the mall’s cinema. The shopping center opened in 2013 and also included a petting zoo, children’s center and bowling.

Tass said the fire started on the top floor but the cause wasn’t immediately known. A criminal investigation was begun.

The mall is about 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) east of Moscow. 
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A British journalist expelled from the country last month did not have valid accreditation and was filming without a permit, Egyptian authorities said Sunday.

The State Information Service said in a statement that The Times of London correspondent Bel Trew, expelled after being threatened with military trial, also covered Egypt unfairly and published false information.

The move comes as part of a heavy crackdown on media ahead of this week’s presidential election, which general-turned-President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi is set to win after all serious competitors were arrested or intimidated into dropping out.

Trew, who had been in Egypt for seven years, was expelled in late February after being arrested while reporting in Shoubra, a central Cairo district. The SIS said she had not applied for a temporary press card while awaiting her annual one.

Neither The Times nor Trew did not immediately had responses to the claim. The SIS said that authorities had issued Trew with credentials allowing her to cover the election but did not clarify how she could return to the country after being expelled.

It also took aim at reporters who wrote about the expulsion, saying they did not ask authorities for their version of events.

Trew said in an account on The Times’ website that she has been listed as a persona non-grata and that Cairo authorities threatened to re-arrest her if she attempts to return.

She said her reporting in Shoubra was part of a story on a migrant boat that disappeared two years ago. An informer seems to have reported her to the police, she added. She was stopped shortly after she left a cafe where she was conducting an interview.

“The taxi had just pulled away from the café … when a minibus of plain-clothes police officers cut us off. Five men jumped out and took me to a nearby police station,” she said, adding that she provided the authorities with the audio recording of the interview. “It was either ignored and not listened to – or listened to and ignored,” she said.

Egypt has often detained, jailed and prosecuted journalists under el-Sissi, who led the military’s 2013 overthrow of the country’s first freely elected civilian President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, after mass protests against his one-year divisive rule.

Advocacy group Reporters Without Borders ranked Egypt as 161 out of 180 countries on their 2017 World Press Freedom Index.
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Carles Puigdemont, the fugitive ex-leader of Catalonia and ardent separatist, was arrested Sunday by German police on an international warrant as he tried to enter the country from Denmark.

The Spanish government told The Associated Press it had received “official confirmation from German authorities of the arrest” of Puigdemont in response to the warrant issued by Spain’s Supreme Court.

Police in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein said highway police arrested Puigdemont on Sunday morning near the A7 highway that leads into Germany.

His lawyer, Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas, said Puigdemont was on his way back to Belgium where he has been staying since fleeing Spain following a failed bid by his regional government in October to declare independence from Spain.

A Spanish Supreme Court judge reactivated an international arrest warrant for Puigdemont on Friday when he was visiting Finland. Arrest warrants have also been issued for five other fugitive Catalan separatists.

Spain was plunged into its worst political crisis in three decades when Puigdemont’s government flouted a court ban and held an ad-hoc referendum on independence for the northeastern region in October.

The Catalan parliament’s subsequent declaration of independence received no international recognition and provoked a takeover by Spanish authorities that they say won’t be lifted until a new government that respects the Constitution is in place.

Spain had originally asked for Puigdemont’s extradition from Belgium after he moved to Brussels, but later withdrew the request until a judge concluded his investigation this week.

In the meantime, Puigdemont was free to make trips to Denmark, Switzerland and Finland, as part of his effort to gain international support for the secessionist movement.

Puigdemont was also able to successfully run a campaign as the head of his “Together for Catalonia” bloc in a regional election in December in which separatist parties maintained their slim majority in Catalonia’s regional parliament.

He had wanted to be re-elected as Catalonia’s regional boss — albeit while remaining abroad to avoid arrest — but eventually was stopped by a Spanish court.

Separatists in Catalonia are currently trying to elect a leader for the regional government before a two-month time limit is up and new elections are called.
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Survivors and families of victims of Friday’s terror attack in France attended a special mass to honor the four killed and three wounded, including an officer who swapped himself with a hostage in a supermarket in the southwestern town of Trebes.

The Bishop of Carcassonne and Narbonne Alain Planet celebrated mass, during which he praised the “extraordinary devotion” of Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame.

“I am here to share in people’s mourning, but also to warm myself to their profound solidarity. This event was also an opportunity to see an extraordinary act, extraordinary devotion by [Lieutenant] Colonel Arnaud Beltrame,” he said. “The whole of France has been touched by this, we were too, especially the Christian community, as he was one of ours. And at the start of this holy week, when we look at Christ take our place to save us from death, well his act takes on a whole new meaning and I’m sure he was aware of that when he did what he did.”

Planet said Friday’s events offered an opportunity to reflect on the suffering felt by countless people around the world.

After French President Emmanuel Macron said evidence suggested the gunman’s actions were considered terrorism, the Islamic State militant group’s propaganda arm claimed responsibility.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said counterterrorism authorities have assumed control of the investigation.

French authorities say two people have been arrested in connection with the shootings, including a woman who is reported to have been close to the assailant.

Islamic State extremist attacks have killed more than 200 people since 2015.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump denounced Friday’s attack in France in a message on Twitter Saturday.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of the horrible attack in France yesterday, and we grieve the nation’s loss,” the president wrote, adding “We also condemn the violent actions of the attacker and anyone who would provide him support. We are with you @EmmanuelMacron!”

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In Russia’s far north, the city of Vorkuta is slowly being reclaimed by the Arctic tundra. The front lines of this battle between the urban and natural worlds are in the suburbs, where abandoned apartment blocks emerge from the towering snowdrifts. Huge icicles claw over the edges of buildings and emerge through shattered windows, seemingly pulling these brutalist relics deeper into their Arctic grave.

Vorkuta’s population began to plummet in the 1990s as one by one the local coal mines closed, leaving a handful operational today.

The suburb of Sovetsky once housed thousands of miners and their families, the pioneers of the Soviet Union’s push north to exploit Vorkuta’s rich coal deposits. The shells of former theaters and ice-bound playgrounds hint at happier times. Now there is little sound apart from the Arctic gales that whistle through the empty streets.

WATCH: Pride, Loneliness in the Deep North: Russians Who Refuse to Abandon Arctic City

Not quite everyone left. Eduard Parshin, a pensioner at 50, tends to his beloved cars in a garage below his apartment. It is a lonely existence.

“There are just three people in the block I live in, and I am the only one living in my section where there are 80 apartments. It is pretty much the same situation in the whole town. What can I say? The settlement is dying. You could say it is already dead,” Parshin told VOA.

Wider far north crisis

Vorkuta’s fate reflects a wider population crisis across the far north. Russia’s Arctic population is shrinking fast, by around 15 percent since 2000. The collapse of the centralized Soviet system led millions to seek better prospects further south, aided by government resettlement programs and money from the World Bank.

Vorkuta authorities want to move the remaining residents into the city center to save on infrastructure costs, and to allow the outlying suburbs to finally succumb to the ice. However, no one will buy the old apartments and there is no money to fund the move – so the remaining residents are stuck in their dying neighborhoods. The mayor of Vorkuta wants Moscow’s help.

“The costs are really high for a local government budget. That is why our task is really to ‘tighten’ the settlements with no prospects, to resettle the residents into the center,” Mayor Igor Gurlev said.

​Young population

Many of those who fled Vorkuta in recent decades were pensioners, and they left behind a young population. At the local college, mining and geology are top of the curriculum, and many students are fervently proud of their hometown.

“If it had not been for the coal, Vorkuta would not have existed. I believe it is my patriotic duty to be part of this industry,” student Artyom Koltakov told VOA.

At Vorkuta’s School of Art, the cultural talent on display offers a colorful antidote to the bitter extremes of coal and ice outside. Students practice classical music, drama and painting, and many of them hope their skills will lead to an alternative career, very different from that of elder family members toiling in the mines thousands of meters beneath the city.

Sergey Gagausov, the principal of the school, is sanguine about his city’s survival.

“Life is certainly not sweet in this city. The oxygen deficiency. The economic situation. But nevertheless, I believe that cities like Vorkuta — they are not dying cities,” he said.

To survive, Vorkuta must offer its young people a reason to stay in its unforgiving landscape. The remaining mines offer some hope, but there are growing doubts that coal offers a sustainable future.
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U.S. President Donald Trump has denounced Friday’s attack in France that claimed four lives, including that of a police officer who exchanged himself for a hostage the gunman was holding captive in a supermarket in the southwestern town of Trebes.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of the horrible attack in France yesterday, and we grieve the nation’s loss,” the president posted on Twitter.

He added, “We also condemn the violent actions of the attacker and anyone who would provide him support. We are with you @EmmanuelMacron!”

Earlier Saturday, France’s interior minister said Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, the police officer who exchanged himself for the hostage, had died. 

“He died for his country. France will never forget his heroism,” Interior Minister Gerard Collomb wrote Saturday on his Twitter account. 

Authorities said two people had been arrested in connection with the shootings, including a woman who was reported to have been close to the assailant.  

The gunman shot three people to death Friday during a burst of violence.

Car hijacking

First, he hijacked a car near Carcassonne, in southern France, Friday morning, killing the passenger and wounding the driver. He then drove off in the car and shot into a group of police officers who had been jogging, wounding one of them.

Next, in Trebes, near Carcassonne, he walked into the Super U supermarket where he opened fire, killing two people. He held several hostages in the supermarket, where Beltrame volunteered to trade himself for a hostage.

The gunman agreed and Beltrame kept an open line on his phone so his fellow officers could hear what was going on. When the officers heard more gunshots, they stormed the market, killing the gunman. Beltrame had been wounded.

​Terrorism

After Macron said evidence suggested the gunman’s actions were considered terrorism, the Islamic State militant group’s propaganda arm claimed responsibility.

“The person who carried out the attack in Trebes in southern France is a soldier of the Islamic State and he carried out the operation in response to a call to target the states” of the anti-IS global coalition, the Amaq agency stated on the messaging app Telegram.

Collomb said Friday, however, that police had not considered 26-year-old suspect Redouane Lakdim, who was born in Morocco and lived in Carcassonne, a terrorist threat.

“He was known by the police for petty crimes. We had monitored him and did not think he had been radicalized,” Collomb said. He added, “He was already under surveillance when he suddenly decided to act.”

The Paris prosecutor’s office said counterterrorism authorities had assumed control of the investigation.

France has been on high alert after being hit with a series of Islamic State extremist attacks since 2015 that have killed more than 200 people.
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European Union leaders have given their unqualified backing to Britain over its accusation that Russia used a nerve agent to try to kill a former double agent and his daughter in Southern England earlier this month. At a two-day summit in Brussels that ended Friday, EU leaders also demanded a permanent exemption from proposed U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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Serbia has canceled a women’s World Championship qualifier handball match with Kosovo over security concerns after nationalists announced they would protest the game.

Serbia’s Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic told local media Friday he called off the match to avoid any clashes between nationalist fans and police.

In response, the European Handball Federation (EHF) said it was expelling the Serbian team from the tournament.

Match moved

The game would have been the first documented sporting encounter between Serbia and its former province, Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008. Serbia does not recognize Kosovo as a nation.

“Could we have organized for this match to go ahead? Certainly. But at what cost?” Stefanovic told the news website B92. “We are not ready to have the police beat up people for the sake of a match, which contradicts all our positions.”

The match was originally set to be played Friday in the central town of Kragujevac, but was moved to an isolated sports center in Kovilovo for security reasons. Both teams agreed the game would be played without fans or media because of the security concerns.

Fans, protesters gather

However, some Serbian fans gathered at the Kovilovo sports center Thursday evening, waving Serbian flags and singing patriotic songs. Police were deployed to the venue Friday in anticipation of the game.

Kosovo declared independence in 2008, nearly a decade after a NATO bombing campaign ended a crackdown by Serbian authorities against secessionists in Kosovo, populated mostly by ethnic Albanians.
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Britain’s opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn sacked his shadow Northern Ireland minister Friday after he called for a second referendum on Brexit, a move that exposes deep divisions in the party over whether to leave the European Union.

Owen Smith, who challenged Corbyn for the party leadership in 2016, wrote an article in the Guardian newspaper Friday urging his party to reopen the question of whether Brexit was the right decision.

Smith said he was sacked for voicing his opinion that Brexit will damage the economy and threaten the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, which ended decades of armed sectarian conflict in the province.

“Those views are shared by Labour members & supporters and I will continue to speak up for them, and in the interest of our country,” Smith said in a Twitter post.

Labour is narrowly ahead in opinion polls but, like Prime Minister Theresa May’s ruling Conservatives, remains deeply divided on Brexit.

Britain is due to formally leave the EU on March 29, 2019.

Over the last few months, Labour has diverged from the government’s policy on Brexit. Last month it said it wanted to remain in the EU’s customs union — a move that would make commerce with the European Union easier but limit Britain’s ability to strike future trade deals with non-EU countries.

The government has ruled out staying in any form of the customs union.

Corbyn, who supported the “Remain” campaign in the 2016 referendum but with little enthusiasm, has repeatedly said it is not Labour’s policy to offer Britons a vote on any final deal that Britain negotiates with the EU.

Smith will be replaced by a former Labour minister, Tony Lloyd, who returned to parliament last year after quitting in 2012 to become police and crime commissioner in Manchester.

Critics of the move

Some Labour lawmakers criticized Corbyn’s decision to sack Smith.

Pro-EU Labour lawmaker Chuka Umunna said it was “extraordinary” that a shadow cabinet member should be sacked for advocating a Brexit policy that commands the overwhelming support of the party.

“What has happened to our party?” he said on Twitter.

Peter Hain, the former Northern Ireland minister and a Labour lawmaker in the House of Lords, Britain’s unelected upper house, accused Corbyn of carrying out of a “Stalinist purge.”
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British investigators have entered the London offices of the data research firm Cambridge Analytica, which is at the center of controversy over the alleged use of millions of people’s personal data from the Facebook social network.

About 20 investigators arrived at the firm’s central London offices late Friday, soon after a judge granted a search warrant that Britain’s Information Commissioners Office had requested.

Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham is investigating claims the research firm illegally acquired the personal data from Facebook. 

The research firm is alleged to have illegally used the data of an estimated 50 million Facebook users to build profiles for U.S. political campaigns, including the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
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