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E.U. proposes stimulus package worth €750 billion.

The European Union’s executive arm said on Wednesday that it wanted to issue bonds in capital markets to raise 750 billion euros, or $860 billion, to finance the bloc’s economic recovery, a leap toward closer European integration seen as divisive by some, but necessary by most.

The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, laid out the details of the proposed recovery package for its 27 member economies, especially those hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic, before the European Parliament in Brussels. “Our unique model built over 70 years is being challenged like never before in our lifetime,” she said.

The fund will distribute €500 billion worth of grants — free money that will not be added to national debt — to all 27 member states, with Italy getting the largest slice, followed by Spain.

This is a crucial element of the recovery effort, which was opposed by some of the bloc’s wealthier nations like the Netherlands and Sweden, but supported by both Germany and France. Lengthy and fraught negotiations lie ahead, as the proposal requires unanimous support by all nations, a Dutch diplomat said on Wednesday shortly after the proposal was introduced.

Europe’s recovery effort will be difficult and expensive, as some of its economies are set to shrink as much as 10 percent this year. Germany and other wealthy countries have their own funds available to spend immediately to prop up their economies, but poorer European Union members need help.

The European Central Bank has been doing the heavy lifting in the early recovery response, buying member states’ bonds itself to ensure that borrowing costs remain low and that funds continue to flow to injured economies.

European countries will also be able to apply for loans from a €250 billion fund, but that money will come with conditions and will count toward debt loads. The loans will also require a cumbersome approval process, and are unlikely to be swiftly available.

Japan made similar moves on Wednesday as its cabinet approved more than a trillion dollars in stimulus funds, including a combination of subsidies to companies and people. The Parliament is expected to approve the measure next month.

Japan’s proposal follows a raft of measures that the country passed in April. Taken together, the two packages would be equivalent to 40 percent of Japan’s economic output, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters on Wednesday.

France is no longer allowing hydroxychloroquine as a treatment.

France on Wednesday revoked the authorization allowing hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 patients, a day after halting the use of the malaria drug in clinical trials. Both steps come on the back of moves by the World Health Organization to temporarily remove the drug from global trials over safety concerns.

In France, the drug was promoted as a miracle cure by a maverick infectious diseases specialist based in Marseille, Didier Raoult, who rose to prominence by conducting several questionable experiments that he said had proved the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in combating the virus.

France had authorized limited use of the drug on patients in serious condition and had included it in several clinical trials. But now the country has joined the ranks of others moving away from the use of the drug, even after several prominent figures, including President Trump, have promoted it.

The president of El Salvador on Tuesday said that he is taking the drug in hopes of warding off the coronavirus.

“I use it as a prophylaxis, President Trump uses it as a prophylaxis, most of the world’s leaders use it as a prophylaxis,” Reuters quoted the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, as saying on Tuesday. (In fact, few if any other world leaders have said they take the drug.)

Mr. Bukele told reporters on Tuesday that his government was no longer promoting the drug as a treatment, following the W.H.O.’s advice, but that patients could still take it as a preventive treatment. El Salvador has just over 2,000 confirmed cases of the virus.

“There is still no scientific evidence, but it is being monitored and used in Brazil and worldwide,” Mr. Bolsonaro said on his official Facebook page, The Associated Press reported. “We are at war: ‘Worse than being defeated is the shame of not having fought.’”

Mr. Khanna is a Michelin-starred chef who was born in India and came to New York City as an aspiring chef 20 years ago, initially working as a dishwasher and delivery man. As the pandemic hit his home country, he watched the news and grew despondent.

“We’ve totally failed our people,” he said in an interview last week, referring to the millions of people in India who are unemployed and desperately hungry. “I wanted to show that solidarity still exists.”

Mr. Khanna posted an emotional appeal on Twitter in early April, asking people to send him details of those who were desperate for food. Within hours, he was flooded with replies.

But it wasn’t as easy to reach the hungry. His first attempt to deliver food, to an elder-care home in southern India, fell apart when the deliverer disappeared with more than 2,000 pounds of rice and nearly 900 pounds of lentils.

Absent from public view for more than a week amid rumors that he had been rushed to Moscow for emergency coronavirus treatment, Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, has reappeared in the capital of his Caucasus region — alive but apparently unwell.

A video posted on social media on Tuesday showed Mr. Kadyrov meeting in Grozny, the Chechen capital, with officials involved in fighting the pandemic, calming speculation that the Chechen leader, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, was dying or even dead.

But with Mr. Kadyrov looking pale, acting far less boisterous than usual and wearing what looked like a cannula, a medical tube that can be used to administer intravenous fluids, on his right hand, the video only added to uncertainty about the state of his health.

The video, filmed and posted on Instagram by Chechnya’s official television channel, was later deleted. A separate video of the same meeting, pruned of footage showing Mr. Kadyrov’s right hand, appeared on Wednesday on an unofficial Instagram account used by the Chechen leader.

Mr. Kadyrov, who has repeatedly threatened journalists and acquired a fearsome reputation for brutality, was expelled from Instagram this month by Facebook, which said it had blocked his accounts in order to comply with United States sanctions. But he has active stayed on social media under various false names.

Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, back at work in the Kremlin after recovering from the coronavirus himself, said on Wednesday said he could not say anything about Mr. Kadyrov or his condition. Two Kremlin-controlled news agencies reported last week that Mr. Kadyrov had flown from Grozny to Moscow for hospital treatment.

But officials in Chechnya had denied that Mr. Kadyrov was ill and undergoing treatment in Moscow, with one suggesting that the Chechen leader had taken a low profile simply because he was “thinking.”

Mr. Kadyrov imposed a tough lockdown on his region at the start of the pandemic, denouncing residents who violated health orders as “worse than terrorists” who should be “buried in a hole in the ground.”

The region, according to official figures compiled by the authorities in Moscow, has reported 698 coronavirus cases and 13 deaths, compared with 4,161 infections and 130 deaths in the neighboring region of Dagestan.

Ten days of national mourning for the victims of the coronavirus began on Wednesday in Spain, the longest official mourning period in the country’s modern history.

The government and the royal family led a nationwide minute of silence at noon, and flags were lowered to half-staff on all public buildings. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said the moment was a time for the country to show its collective sorrow and to honor the tens of thousands who died from the virus.

The major cities of Madrid and Barcelona on Monday caught up with the rest of the country in easing lockdown measures that had been gradually rolled out for weeks, and Mr. Sánchez said he had waited to start the official mourning period until the whole country had entered the first phase of returning to public life.

The extended lockdown has exacerbated political tensions over the government’s handling of the epidemic. The military police opened an investigation into the government’s decision to allow some 120,000 people to gather in Madrid for International Women’s Day on March 8, just a week before Spain declared a state of emergency.

On Monday, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, Spain’s interior minister, fired the head of the military police in Madrid for not informing the government about the investigation. To protest the government’s decision, another senior police official resigned on Tuesday. Speaking in Congress on Wednesday, the leader of the main opposition party called for Mr. Grande-Marlaska to resign for mistreating Spain’s police.

For much of the last two months, Paris has been empty — its shops and cafes shuttered, its streets deserted, its millions of tourists gone.

Freed of people, the urban landscape has evoked an older Paris. In particular, it has called up the singular Paris of Eugène Atget, an early 20th-century father of modern photography, in his unsentimental focus on detail.

In thousands of pictures, Atget shot an empty city, getting up early each morning and lugging his primitive equipment throughout the streets. His images reduced Paris to its architectural essence.

A Times photographer, Mauricio Lima, has followed in Atget’s footsteps, shooting images of the same scenes his famous predecessor captured. But those streets are now deserted because of the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Lima’s recreations offer new insight into Atget’s work — and into the meaning of a city unique in its beauty but also in its coldness.

The critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin famously invoked crime scenes in discussing Atget’s photographs. He was pointing to their emptiness, their clinical attention to details of the urban landscape, their absolute rejection of the sentimental and the grandiose.

As Benjamin observed, Atget established a beneficial “distance between man and his environment.” And Mr. Lima’s haunting updated recreations confirm the long-dead photographer’s disquieting insight: Paris doesn’t care about your presence. It is indifferent, and it will certainly go on without you.

As countries across the Asia-Pacific region gradually open up after months of lockdowns, officials are struggling to strike that elusive balance between getting people back to work and keeping the virus at bay.

Economists and business leaders in China began warning in February that lockdowns and other stringent measures were hurting the lives and livelihoods of millions of people — all while contributing little to the containment effort. But when China eventually loosened its lockdowns, new pockets of infection cropped up, prompting the authorities in the northeastern province of Jilin to impose a Wuhan-style lockdown.

Similar tensions, backsliding and calls for compromise are now playing out elsewhere in the region.

In Indonesia, for example, which has 23,000 confirmed cases and counting, President Joko Widodo is concerned that the economic losses pose as much of a threat to the public as the virus. On Wednesday, he outlined plans for what he calls a “new normal” protocol meant to slow the coronavirus while reviving the economy. He called for deploying troops and police officers across hard-hit parts of the country to help enforce containment measures.

In Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese territory, the authorities have adopted a “suppress and lift” strategy to alternately tighten and relax measures as transmissions surge and wane. Civil servants, for instance, were ordered to work from home in March — for the second time — after the city saw a new wave of imported cases. They’re now back in the office.

And the authorities in South Korea have been easing social-distancing restrictions and reopening schools after successfully reducing what had been one of the largest outbreaks outside China to a trickle.

Still, the country reported 40 new cases on Wednesday, amid fears that an outbreak that started in nightclubs in Seoul early this month was infecting people elsewhere. The new patients in recent days include 11 cases linked to a duck restaurant in Seoul, and 36 linked to a home-delivery logistics center south of the city.

The Swiss government said on Wednesday that public and private events of up to 300 people and spontaneous gatherings of up to 30 people would be allowed again from June 6.

The government is to decide on June 24 whether to also lift a ban on events with up to 1,000 people, though larger gatherings will not be permitted before the end of August at the earliest.

About a dozen U.S. states are seeing an uptick in new virus cases, bucking the national trend of staying steady or seeing decreases. At least half of the states seeing more infections were part of an early wave of reopenings in late April and early May, among them Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee.

New coronavirus cases have also continued to rise in North Carolina, where the Republican National Convention is scheduled to be held in August. President Trump threatened on Monday to move the convention unless Gov. Roy Cooper provided a “guarantee” that there would be no virus-related restrictions on the size of the event. Mr. Cooper, a Democrat, refused to do so on Tuesday.

The new numbers could reflect increased testing capacity in some places, though they also indicate that the virus’s grip on the country is far from over.

“It’s like nothing had happened,” Mr. Chan said in an interview. “I’m dumbfounded. How could they make a U-turn so fast?”

Mr. Chan wrote “The Fat Years” as a cautionary tale. Today, it seems all too real. A disaster brings suffering and death. Collective amnesia sets in. The Communist Party emerges stronger than ever.

How could people forget so easily? Of course, the Communist Party controls the media and history. As George Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

At the height of China’s coronavirus outbreak, officials made quick use of the fancy tracking devices in everybody’s pockets — their smartphones — to identify and isolate people who might be spreading the illness.

Months later, China’s official statistics suggest that the worst of the epidemic has passed there, but the government’s monitoring apps are hardly fading into obsolescence. Instead, they are tiptoeing toward becoming a permanent fixture of everyday life, one with potential to be used in troubling and invasive ways.

Zhou Jiangyong, the Communist Party secretary of the eastern tech hub of Hangzhou, said this month that the city’s app should be an “intimate health guardian” for residents, one that is used often and “loved so much that you cannot bear to part with it,” according to an official announcement.

While the technology has doubtless helped many workers and employers get back to their lives, it has also prompted concern in China, where people are increasingly protective of their digital privacy. Companies and government agencies in China have a mixed record on keeping personal information safe from hacks and leaks. The authorities have also taken an expansive view of using high-tech surveillance tools in the name of public well-being.

The government’s virus-tracking software has been collecting information, including location data, on people in hundreds of cities across China. But the authorities have set few limits on how that data can be used. And now, officials in some places are loading their apps with new features, hoping the software will live on as more than just an emergency measure.

Like the Tokyo Olympics and other major events, international negotiations designed to address the threat of climate change will quite likely be delayed by a full year because of the pandemic.

“Given the uneven spread of Covid-19, this date would present the lowest risk of further postponement and the best chance of delivering an inclusive and ambitious” conference, British officials said.

The gathering is meant to rally world leaders to chart ways to avert the worst effects of climate change, including heat waves and flooded coastal cities.

Delaying the talks by a full year could worsen the problems, some diplomats say. Countries and international financial institutions may now feel freer to enact economic recovery plans without paying much heed to their climate implications.

More than 20 such conferences were held before countries agreed on the landmark 2015 Paris pact, under which they pledged to keep the increase in global average temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, compared with preindustrial levels.

Grandparents choking on food because they were fed lying down. Residents left in filthy beds and soiled diapers for hours, in rooms with “significant fecal contamination” and cockroaches. Residents screaming for help for more than two hours before anyone answered.

Canadians knew the coronavirus had shred a deadly path through the country’s long-term-care homes, but a report drafted by the Canadian military adds new layers level of horror to the shocking tale.

“It’s appalling, it’s disgusting,” Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, said on Tuesday as he released the confidential report to the public and demanded justice for families.

While nursing homes have been pummeled by the pandemic in many countries, in Canada they seem to have suffered an especially severe blow. Earlier this month, more than 80 percent of the country’s coronavirus deaths were reported to have been tied to long-term-care homes. (That figure has now passed 6,500.)

In the country’s two most populous provinces, Ontario and Quebec, many centers were so badly hit and so understaffed that the federal government sent in the Canadian armed forces to help last month.

The new report, which pertains to five homes in Ontario, is heart-wrenching.

It cites not just a lack of infection control, but also burned-out employees who worked in a “culture of fear to use supplies because they cost money.” Essential items like wipes and linens were kept under “lock and key,” the report says.

In one home, staff members reported that patients had not been bathed for weeks, and in others, residents were not fed regularly and food was left out of reach.

Calling the report “deeply disturbing,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, “I had, obviously, a range of emotions of anger, of sadness, of frustration, of grief.”

“We need to take action as a country,” Mr. Trudeau said.

Reporting was contributed by Andrew Higgins, Katrin Bennhold, Mihir Zaveri, Karen Zraick, Adam Nossiter, Raphael Minder, Li Yuan, Constant Méheut, Shalini Venugopal Bhagat, Russell Goldman, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Elaine Yu, Choe Sang-Hun, Raymond Zhong, Richard C. Paddock, Dera Menra Sijabat, Ben Dooley, Makiko Inoue, Mike Ives, Jenny Gross, Catherine Porter, Somini Sengupta, Alexandra Stevenson and Keith Bradsher.

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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The Global Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nationalism https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/world/europe/sweden-immigration-nationalism.html

The Global Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nationalism

(Russia’s hand in all of this is largely hidden from view. But fingerprints abound.)

Sweden was long seen as a progressive utopia. Then came waves of immigrants — and the forces of populism at home and abroad.

By Jo Becker | Published Aug. 10, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 11, 2019 8:38 PM ET |

RINKEBY, Sweden — Johnny Castillo, a Peruvian-born neighborhood watchman in this district of Stockholm, still puzzles over the strange events that two years ago turned the central square of this predominantly immigrant community into a symbol of multiculturalism run amok.

First came a now-infamous comment by President Trump, suggesting that Sweden’s history of welcoming refugees was at the root of a violent attack in Rinkeby the previous evening, even though nothing had actually happened.

“You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden!” Mr. Trump told supporters at a rally on Feb. 18, 2017. “They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.”

The president’s source: Fox News, which had excerpted a short film promoting a dystopian view of Sweden as a victim of its asylum policies, with immigrant neighborhoods crime-ridden “no-go zones.”

But two days later, as Swedish officials were heaping bemused derision on Mr. Trump, something did in fact happen in Rinkeby: Several dozen masked men attacked police officers making a drug arrest, throwing rocks and setting cars ablaze.

And it was right around that time, according to Mr. Castillo and four other witnesses, that Russian television crews showed up, offering to pay immigrant youths “to make trouble” in front of the cameras.

“They wanted to show that President Trump is right about Sweden,” Mr. Castillo said, “that people coming to Europe are terrorists and want to disturb society.”

That nativist rhetoric — that immigrants are invading the homeland — has gained ever-greater traction, and political acceptance, across the West amid dislocations wrought by vast waves of migration from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. In its most extreme form, it is echoed in the online manifesto of the man accused of gunning down 22 people last weekend in El Paso.

In the nationalists’ message-making, Sweden has become a prime cautionary tale, dripping with schadenfreude. What is even more striking is how many people in Sweden — progressive, egalitarian, welcoming Sweden — seem to be warming to the nationalists’ view: that immigration has brought crime, chaos and a fraying of the cherished social safety net, not to mention a withering away of national culture and tradition.

Fueled by an immigration backlash — Sweden has accepted more refugees per capita than any other European country — right-wing populism has taken hold, reflected most prominently in the steady ascent of a political party with neo-Nazi roots, the Sweden Democrats. In elections last year, they captured nearly 18 percent of the vote.

To dig beneath the surface of what is happening in Sweden, though, is to uncover the workings of an international disinformation machine, devoted to the cultivation, provocation and amplication of far-right, anti-immigrant passions and political forces. Indeed, that machine, most influentially rooted in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and the American far right, underscores a fundamental irony of this political moment: the globalization of nationalism.

The central target of these manipulations from abroad — and the chief instrument of the Swedish nationalists’ success — is the country’s increasingly popular, and virulently anti-immigrant, digital echo chamber.

A New York Times examination of its content, personnel and traffic patterns illustrates how foreign state and nonstate actors have helped to give viral momentum to a clutch of Swedish far-right web sites.

Russian and Western entities that traffic in disinformation, including an Islamaphobic think tank whose former chairman is now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, have been crucial linkers to the Swedish sites, helping to spread their message to susceptible Swedes.

At least six Swedish sites have received financial backing through advertising revenue from a Russian- and Ukrainian-owned auto-parts business based in Berlin, whose online sales network oddly contains buried digital links to a range of far-right and other socially divisive content.

Writers and editors for the Swedish sites have been befriended by the Kremlin. And in one strange Rube Goldbergian chain of events, a frequent German contributor to one Swedish site has been implicated in the financing of a bombing in Ukraine, in a suspected Russian false-flag operation.

The distorted view of Sweden pumped out by this disinformation machine has been used, in turn, by anti-immigrant parties in Britain, Germany, Italy and elsewhere to stir xenophobia and gin up votes, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit that tracks the online spread of far-right extremism.

“I’d put Sweden up there with the anti-Soros campaign,” said Chloe Colliver, a researcher for the institute, referring to anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros, the billionaire benefactor of liberal causes. “It’s become an enduring centerpiece of the far-right conversation.”

From Margins to Mainstream Mattias Karlsson, the Sweden Democrats’ international secretary and chief ideologist, likes to tell the story of how he became a soldier in what he has described as the “existential battle for our culture’s and our nation’s survival.”

It was the mid-1990s and Mr. Karlsson, now 41, was attending high school in the southern city of Vaxjo. Sweden was accepting a record number of refugees from the Balkan War and other conflicts. In Vaxjo and elsewhere, young immigrant men began joining brawling “kicker” gangs, radicalizing Mr. Karlsson and drawing him toward the local skinhead scene.

He took to wearing a leather jacket with a Swedish flag on the back and was soon introduced to Mats Nilsson, a Swedish National Socialist leader who gave him a copy of “Mein Kampf.” They began to debate: Mr. Nilsson argued that the goal should be ethnic purity — the preservation of “Swedish DNA.” Mr. Karlsson countered that the focus should be on preserving national culture and identity. That, he said, was when Mr. Nilsson conferred on him an epithet of insufficient commitment to the cause — “meatball patriot,” meaning that “I thought that every African or Arab can come to this country as long as they assimilate and eat meatballs.”

It is an account that offers the most benign explanation for an odious association. Whatever the case, in 1999, he joined the Sweden Democrats, a party undeniably rooted in Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement. Indeed, scholars of the far right say that is what sets it apart from most anti-immigration parties in Europe and makes its rise from marginalized to mainstream so remarkable.

The party was founded in 1988 by several Nazi ideologues, including a former member of the Waffen SS. Early on, it sought international alliances with the likes of the White Aryan Resistance, a white supremacist group founded by a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Some Sweden Democrats wore Nazi uniforms to party functions. Its platform included the forced repatriation of all immigrants since 1970.

That was not, however, a winning formula in a country where social democrats have dominated every election for more than a century.

While attending university, Mr. Karlsson had met Jimmie Akesson, who took over the Sweden Democrats’ youth party in 2000 and became party leader in 2005. Mr. Akesson was outspoken in his belief that Muslim refugees posed “the biggest foreign threat to Sweden since the Second World War.” But to make that case effectively, he and Mr. Karlsson agreed, they needed to remake the party’s image.

“We needed to really address our past,” Mr. Karlsson said.

They purged neo-Nazis who had been exposed by the press. They announced a “zero tolerance” policy toward extreme xenophobia and racism, emphasized their youthful leadership and urged members to dress presentably. And while immigration remained at the center of their platform, they moderated the way they talked about it.

No longer was the issue framed in terms of keeping certain ethnic groups out, or deporting those already in. Rather it was about how unassimilated migrants were eviscerating not just the nation’s cultural identity but also the social-welfare heart of the Swedish state.

Under the grand, egalitarian idea of the “folkhemmet,” or people’s home, in which the country is a family and its citizens take care of one another, Swedes pay among the world’s highest effective tax rates, in return for benefits like child care, health care, free college education and assistance when they grow old.

The safety net has come under strain for a host of economic and demographic reasons, many of which predate the latest refugee flood. But in the Sweden Democrats’ telling, the blame lies squarely at the feet of the foreigners, many of whom lag far behind native Swedes in education and economic accomplishment. One party advertisement depicted a white woman trying to collect benefits while being pursued by niqab-wearing immigrants pushing strollers.

To what extent the party’s makeover is just window dressing is an open question.

The doubts were highlighted in what became known as “the Iron Pipe Scandal” in 2012. Leaked video showed two Sweden Democrat MPs and the party’s candidate for attorney general hurling racist slurs at a comedian of Kurdish descent, then threatening a drunken witness with iron pipes.

Under Mr. Akesson and Mr. Karlsson, the party has hosted the American white nationalist Richard Spencer. High-ranking party officials have bounced between Sweden and Hungary, ruled by the authoritarian nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Mr. Karlsson himself has come under fire for calling out an extremist site as neo-fascist while using an alias to recommend posts as “worth reading” to party members.

“There’s a public face and the face they wear behind closed doors,” said Daniel Poohl, who heads Expo, a Stockholm-based foundation that tracks far-right extremism.

Still, even detractors admit that strategy has worked. In 2010, the Sweden Democrats captured 5.7 percent of the vote, enough for the party, and Mr. Karlsson, to enter Parliament for the first time. That share has steadily increased along with the growing population of refugees. (Today, roughly 20 percent of Sweden’s population is foreign born.)

At its peak in 2015, Sweden accepted 163,000 asylum-seekers, mostly from Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria. Though border controls and tighter rules have eased that flow, Ardalan Shekarabi, the country’s public administration minister, acknowledged that his government had been slow to act.

Mr. Shekarabi, an immigrant from Iran, said the sheer number of refugees had overwhelmed the government’s efforts to integrate them.

“I absolutely don’t think that the majority of Swedes have racist or xenophobic views, but they had questions about this migration policy and the other parties didn’t have any answers,” he said. “Which is one of the reasons why Sweden Democrats had a case.”

A Right-Wing Echo Chamber

As the 2018 elections approached, Swedish counterintelligence was on high alert for foreign interference. Russia, the hulking neighbor to the east, was seen as the main threat. After the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 American election, Sweden had reason to fear it could be next.

“Russia’s goal is to weaken Western countries by polarizing the debate,” said Daniel Stenling, the Swedish Security Service’s counterintelligence chief. “For the last five years, we have seen more and more aggressive intelligence work against our nation.”

But as it turned out, there was no hacking and dumping of internal campaign documents, as in the United States. Nor was there an overt effort to swing the election to the Sweden Democrats, perhaps because the party, in keeping with Swedish popular opinion, has become more critical of the Kremlin than some of its far-right European counterparts.

Instead, security officials say, the foreign influence campaign took a different, more subtle form: helping nurture Sweden’s rapidly evolving far-right digital ecosystem.

For years, the Sweden Democrats had struggled to make their case to the public. Many mainstream media outlets declined their ads. The party even had difficulty getting the postal service to deliver its mailers. So it built a network of closed Facebook pages whose reach would ultimately exceed that of any other party.

But to thrive in the viral sense, that network required fresh, alluring content. It drew on a clutch of relatively new websites whose popularity was exploding.

Members of the Sweden Democrats helped create two of them: Samhallsnytt (News in Society) and Nyheter Idag (News Today). By the 2018 election year, they, along with a site called Fria Tider (Free Times), were among Sweden’s 10 most shared news sites.

These sites each reached one-tenth of all Swedish internet users a week and, according to an Oxford University study, accounted for 85 percent of the election-related “junk news” — deemed deliberately distorted or misleading — shared online. There were other sites, too, all injecting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic messaging into the Swedish political bloodstream.

“Immigration Behind Shortage of Drinking Water in Northern Stockholm,” read one recent headline. “Refugee Minor Raped Host Family’s Daughter; Thought It Was Legal,” read another. “Performed Female Genital Mutilation on Her Children — Given Asylum in Sweden,” read a third.

Russia’s hand in all of this is largely hidden from view. But fingerprints abound.

For instance, one writer for Samhallsnytt, who previously worked for the Sweden Democrats, was recently declined parliamentary press accreditation after the security police determined he had been in contact with Russian intelligence.

Fria Tider is considered not only one of the most extreme sites, but also among the most Kremlin-friendly. It frequently swaps material with the Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik. The site is linked, via domain ownership records, to Granskning Sverige, called the Swedish “troll factory” for its efforts to entrap and embarrass mainstream journalists. Among its frequent targets: journalists who write negatively about Russia.

“We’ve had death threats, spam attacks, emails — this year has been totally crazy,” said Eva Burman, the editor of Eskilstuna-Kuriren, a newspaper that found itself in the cross hairs after criticizing the Russian annexation of Crimea and investigating Granskning Sverige itself.

At the magazine Nya Tider, the editor, Vavra Suk, has traveled to Moscow as an election observer and to Syria, where he produced Kremlin-friendly accounts of the civil war. Nya Tider has published work by Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist Russian philosopher who has been called “Putin’s Rasputin”; Mr. Suk’s writings for Mr. Dugin’s think tank include one titled “Donald Trump Can Make Europe Great Again.”

Nya Tider’s contributors include Manuel Ochsenreiter, editor of Zuerst!, a German far-right newspaper. Mr. Ochsenreiter — who has appeared regularly on RT, the Kremlin propaganda channel — worked until recently for Markus Frohnmaier, a member of the German Bundestag representing the far-right Alternative for Germany party. Documents leaked to a consortium of European media outlets — documents that Mr. Frohnmaier has called fake — have suggested that Moscow aided his election campaign in order to have an “absolutely controlled MP.”

Mr. Ochsenreiter, for his part, has been implicated in Polish court in the financing of a 2018 firebombing attack on a Hungarian cultural center in Ukraine. The plot, according to testimony from a Polish extremist charged with carrying it out, was designed to pin responsibility on Ukrainian nationalists and stoke ethnic tensions, to Russia’s benefit. Mr. Ochsenreiter has not been charged in Poland, but prosecutors in Berlin said they had begun a preliminary investigation. He has denied involvement.

Mr. Suk declined to comment.

Then there is Nyheter Idag. Its founder, Chang Frick — a former Sweden Democrat official who takes a maverick’s glee in his defiance of orthodoxy — readily admits to being a paid contributor to RT. At a pizza shop near his home one afternoon, he pointedly noted that his girlfriend was Russian and, with a flourish, pulled out a wad of rubles from a recent trip.

“Here is my real boss! It’s Putin!” he laughed.

But Mr. Frick, the son of a Swedish Roma and a Polish Jew, said Nyheter Idag answered to no one, neither the Sweden Democrats nor the Kremlin, though he added that his relentless reporting about the problems posed by immigrants dovetailed with both their agendas.

“People can see what’s happening in the streets,” he said, adding, “I’ve been accused of being a racist — I’m being ‘paid by the Sweden Democrats,’ I’m ‘a spy for Russia.’ That just tells me I’m kicking where it hurts.”

Still, he said he had reason to believe that “there is a little bit of collusion between Russia and some Swedish right-wing media.” One of his early scoops involved exposing the drinking and womanizing shenanigans of a Sweden Democrat member of Parliament who had been invited to Moscow. During that reporting trip, he said, he was invited to serve as an independent observer in Russia’s presidential election and to meet Mr. Putin.

He declined the invitation.

There is another curious Russian common denominator: Six of Sweden’s alt-right sites have drawn advertising revenue from a network of online auto-parts stores based in Germany and owned by four businessmen from Russia and Ukraine, three of whom have adopted German-sounding surnames.

The ads were first noticed by the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, which discovered that while they appeared to be for a variety of outlets, all traced back to the same Berlin address and were owned by a parent company, Autodoc GmbH.

The Times found that the company had also placed ads on anti-Semitic and other extremist sites in Germany, Hungary, Austria and elsewhere in Europe.

Which raised a question: Was the auto-parts dealer simply trying to drum up business, or was it also trying to support the far-right cause?

Rikard Lindholm, co-founder of a data-driven marketing firm who has worked with Swedish authorities to combat disinformation, dug deeper into the Autodoc network.

Hidden beneath the user-friendly interface of some of the earliest Autodoc sites lay what Mr. Lindholm, an expert in the forensic analysis of online traffic, described as “icebergs” of blog-like content completely unrelated to auto parts, translated into a variety of languages. A visitor to one of the car-parts sites could not simply access this content from the home page; instead, one had to know and type in the full URL.

“It’s like they have a back door and it’s open and you can have a look around, but to do that you have to know that the door is there,” Mr. Lindholm said.

Much of the content was not political. But there were links to posts about a range of divisive social issues, some of them translated into other languages. One hidden link — about female genital mutilation in Muslim countries — had been translated from English to Polish before being posted. Yet another post, from a site called AnsweringIslam.net, concluded, “Islam hates you.”

Thomas Casper, a spokesman for Autodoc, said the company had no “interest at all in supporting alt-right media,” and added, “We vehemently oppose racism and far-right principles.”

He said the company’s digital advertising team worked with third parties to place ads on “trusted websites with substantial traffic.” Autodoc, he said, had instituted controls to try to ensure that it no longer advertised on far-right sites.

As for the icebergs, after receiving The Times’s inquiry, the company removed what Mr. Casper called the “obviously dubious and outdated content.” It had originally been placed there, he said, to improve search engine optimization.

But Mr. Lindholm said that made no sense. “By linking to irrelevant content, it actually hurts their business because Google frowns on that,” he said.

Links Abroad

Another way to look inside the explosive growth of Sweden’s alt-right outlets is to see who is linking to them. The more links, especially from well-trafficked outlets, the more likely Google is to rank the sites as authoritative. That, in turn, means that Swedes are more likely to see them when they search for, say, immigration and crime.

The Times analyzed more than 12 million available links from over 18,000 domains to four prominent far-right sites — Nyheter Idag, Samhallsnytt, Fria Tider and Nya Tider. The data was culled by Mr. Lindholm from two search engine optimization tools and represents a snapshot of all known links through July 2.

As expected, given the relative paucity of Swedish speakers worldwide, most of the links came from Swedish-language sites.

But the analysis turned up a surprising number of links from well-trafficked foreign-language sites — which suggests that the Swedish sites’ rapid growth has been driven to a significant degree from abroad.

“It has the makings, the characteristics, of an operation whose purpose or goal is to help these sites become relevant by getting them to be seen as widely as possible,” Mr. Lindholm said.

Over all, more than one in five links were from non-Swedish language sites. English-language sites, along with Norwegian ones, linked the most, nearly a million times. But other European-language far-right sites — Russian but also Czech, Danish, German, Finnish and Polish — were also frequent linkers.

The Times identified 356 domains that linked to all four Swedish sites.

Many are well known in American far-right circles. Among them is the Gatestone Institute, a think tank whose site regularly stokes fears about Muslims in the United States and Europe. Its chairman until last year was John R. Bolton, now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, and its funders have included Rebekah Mercer, a prominent wealthy Trump supporter.

Other domains that linked to all four Swedish sites included Stormfront, one of the oldest and largest American white supremacist sites; Voice of Europe, a Kremlin-friendly right-wing site; a Russian-language blog called Sweden4Rus.nu; and FreieWelt.net, a site supportive of the AfD in Germany.

This loosely knit global network does not just help increase readership in Sweden; researchers have tracked how Russian state outlets like RT and Sputnik, along with Western platforms like Infowars and Breitbart, have picked up and amplified Swedish immigration-related stories to galvanize xenophobia among their audiences.

Bjorn Palmertz, a disinformation specialist at the Swedish Defense University, said this “information laundry” had resulted in globally viral stories like the one about the Swedish town that allowed a mosque to issue calls to prayer while denying a church’s application to ring its bells — never mind that the church had not applied.

“Sweden is portrayed either as a heaven or a hell,” said Annika Rembe, Sweden’s consul general in New York. “But conservative value-based politicians in Hungary, Poland, the United States and elsewhere would use Sweden as an example of a failed state: If you follow this path, your society will look like Sweden’s.”

The ‘Village Of The World’

The auditorium at Rinkebyskolan, a middle school across the street from Rinkeby’s town square, filled rapidly. Women wearing hijabs and burqas spilled in, taking their seats on the left. Men sat to the right. From the speakers came the voice of an imam reading from the Quran.

Developed as part of a 1960s-era government initiative to build a million affordable dwellings, Rinkeby was originally home to a mix of Swedes and laborers from southern Europe. Over time it became known as Sweden’s “Village of the World,” with people from more than 100 countries living in drab, low-slung apartment blocks. Today, more than 91 percent of Rinkeby’s roughly 16,400 residents are immigrants and their children.

At a long table in front of the auditorium sat Niclas Andersson, a towering man who serves as Rinkeby’s police chief. Once prayers concluded, the audience began peppering him with questions.

Some worried about drug trafficking inside the apartment complexes, others about the prevalence of guns. Could the police install more cameras?

To be sure, Mr. Andersson said in an interview afterward, there were problems in Rinkeby, his posting for 18 years. But it is hardly the hellscape that nationalists bent on painting Sweden as a failed state hold it out to be.

Many newcomers still struggle to get a foothold in the job market, so unemployment is relatively high, at 8.8 percent. And in the larger Rinkeby-Kista borough, there were 825 reported episodes of violent crime last year, a rate 36 percent higher per capita than Stockholm as a whole.

But Mr. Andersson does not recognize the Rinkeby portrayed in the movie — directed by a filmmaker who has shot political ads for Republicans in Congress — that led Mr. Trump to make his “last night in Sweden” remarks. Rinkeby is not a no-go zone, Mr. Andersson said, an assertion supported by the film’s chief cameraman, who has acknowledged that officers who seemed to suggest otherwise had been edited out of context.

In fact, the number of police officers in Rinkeby has more than quadrupled since 2015. Assaults and robberies are down, Mr. Andersson said. Fatal shootings are down, too — of 11 in Stockholm last year, one was in Rinkeby. Nationally, the violent crime rate is one-fifth that of the United States.

“It was a heavily slanted picture,” Mr. Andersson said. “You zero in on a couple of incidents, then use that to describe the whole area.”

By the time Mr. Trump zeroed in on Rinkeby, “the government was tackling the problems,” said Amela Mahovic, a local reporter for Swedish public television. When the actual clash broke out soon after, she said, community elders spread the word to local youths: “You need to stop this.”

But soon, they said, they found that outside forces wanted the world to see a different picture.

Guleed Mohamed, then a researcher for public television, said he had spoken to a reporting team from Russia and Ukraine in Rinkeby Square that week and had tried to ask about Russia.

“They changed the subject to how multiculturalism doesn’t work,” he recalled. “And then they quickly connected that to the clash — ‘I want to talk about the riot. Don’t you think this is connected to the influx of migrants?’”

Hani Al Saleh, a Syrian who came to Sweden as a teenager, was working as a guard in Rinkeby. Tall and muscular with a sculpted beard, Mr. Saleh is known as “Amo,” or uncle, by the local youth. He said three young immigrants he knew told him that Russian journalists had tried to bribe them with 400 kronor (about $43) apiece.

“Boys, do you want to do some action in front of the camera?” they said the Russian journalists asked them.

Mr. Saleh later took a Danish journalist to meet two of the young men. After searching online, they recognized the logo of the Russian state-owned news channel NTV, along with the Russians who had made the offer.

The journalist contacted NTV, which denied the whole thing. But besides Mr. Castillo, the night watchman, The Times found other witnesses who backed up Mr. Saleh’s account.

Elvir Kazinic and Mustafa Zatara said they were in the square a couple of days after the clash when they overheard another group of young men talking about Russian journalists and a 400 krona bribe to fight.

“To stoop to that level and offer kids money,” said Mr. Kazinic, a Bosnian émigré who serves on Rinkeby’s district council, “that is low.”

Mr. Zatara, a poet, knows well the consequences of stirring up anti-immigrant racism. His father, Hasan Zatara, a Palestinian, came to Sweden in 1969, earned a high school diploma and opened a convenience store.

Standing behind the cash register on a January afternoon 27 years ago, he became the final victim of John Ausonius, a serial shooter who terrorized immigrant communities, killing one person and wounding 10 others. Hasan Zatara was paralyzed.

Mr. Ausonius later said he was inspired by the anti-immigrant party of the day, New Democracy.

“When my father was shot in 1992, we had New Democracy,” Mustafa Zatara said. “Today we have the Sweden Democrats. Then, they wore bomber jackets and boots. Today, they wear bow ties and suits. It’s normalized now in the Swedish political corridor.”

Building A Coalition

After the commotion in Rinkeby died down, Russian news agencies kept calling the police, fruitlessly asking permission to ride with officers patrolling the district.

“This went on week in and week out,” said Varg Gyllander, the department’s press officer.

Last September, right after the Swedish elections, the requests abruptly stopped.

The Sweden Democrats had their best showing yet. Their nearly 18 percent share of the vote hamstrung Swedish politics, with the mainstream parties unable to form a government for more than four months.

The Social Democrats finally formed a shaky coalition that excluded the Sweden Democrats. But it came at a price: some prominent center-right politicians are now expressing a willingness to work with the Sweden Democrats, portending a new political alignment.

In February, the Sweden Democrats’ Mr. Karlsson strode into a Washington-area hotel where leaders of the American and European right were gathering for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. As he settled in at the lobby bar, straightening his navy three-piece suit, he was clearly very much at home.

At the conference — where political boot-camp training mixed with speeches by luminaries like Mr. Trump and the British populist leader Nigel Farage — Mr. Karlsson hoped to learn about the infrastructure of the American conservative movement, particularly its funding and use of the media and think tanks to broaden its appeal. But in a measure of how nationalism and conservatism have merged in Mr. Trump’s Washington, many of the Americans with whom he wanted to network were just as eager to network with him.

Mr. Karlsson had flown in from Colorado, where he had given a speech at the Steamboat Institute, a conservative think tank. That morning, Tobias Andersson, 23, the Sweden Democrats’ youngest member of Parliament and a contributor to Breitbart, had spoken to Americans for Tax Reform, a bastion of tax-cut orthodoxy.

Now, they found themselves encircled by admirers like Matthew Hurtt, the director for external relationships at Americans for Prosperity, part of the billionaire Koch brothers’ political operation, and Matthew Tyrmand, a board member of Project Veritas, a conservative group that uses undercover filming to sting its targets.

Mr. Tyrmand, who is also an adviser to a senator from Poland’s anti-immigration ruling Law and Justice party, was particularly eager. “You are taking your country back!” he exclaimed.

Mr. Karlsson smiled.

Christina Anderson contributed reporting.

0 notes

savetopnow · 6 years

Text

2018-03-18 06 NEWS now

NEWS

Associated Press

The Latest: Officials identify 4 victims in bridge collapse

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar joins St Patrick's Parade

Russian voters pressured as Putin eyes new presidential term

AP learns fired McCabe kept personal memos regarding Trump

Talks on $1.3 trillion US spending bill hit critical stage

BBC News

Blossom in south-west China captured by drone

The Indians who used kayaking to transform their lives

Swiss pianist gives concert on ice in northern Baltic Sea

John F Kennedy's lost 'last' speech recreated

The women bringing animated adventures to life

Chicago Tribune

Four in critical condition after Harvey strip club shooting, official says

Pritzker defends putting $69.5 million of his fortune into campaign as politicians march in St. Patrick's Day parade

Man stabbed during attempted robbery on Metra North Line train

Judge denies bail for husband charged with fatally shooting wife in Markham, abducting their 2 kids

Man suspected in at least 10 batteries on Red Line being questioned by police

LA Times

2 cars, 3 bodies removed from debris of collapsed Miami bridge

Top-seeded Villanova has no problem beating Alabama to reach Sweet 16

There's no longer a big gap in the level of play between Mexico's Liga MX and MLS, Donovan says

Homeless family — 2 children, 2 adults — found dead in van in Garden Grove parking lot

As a new generation is thrust into the debate over guns, school walkouts highlight division among students

NPR News

Facebook Suspends Political Data Firm Used In Trump Campaign

U.S. Cities Awash In Green To Celebrate St. Patrick's Day

Some Economists See A Plus Side In Eliminating Term Limits For China's Xi Jinping

Black Voters Need More Convincing From Democrats In 2018

Follow Up: Did The Computerless Computer Teacher Ever Get A Computer?

New York Times

Crack on Florida Bridge Was Discussed in Meeting Hours Before Collapse

Trump Lawyer Says Special Counsel Inquiry Should Be Ended

President of Steven Cohen’s Investment Firm Quits Amid Gender Bias Lawsuit

North Korea-Sweden Talks Focus on ‘Peaceful Solution’ to Nuclear Conflict

Mueller Wants Trump’s Business Records. What’s the Russia Connection?

ProPublica

Jacksonville Sheriff Admits Race May Have Played a Role in Ticket Writing

The FBI — ‘Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity’ — Still Working on Diversity

Getting to Know Illinois — And You

Correction: Trump’s Pick to Head CIA Did Not Oversee Waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah

Flawed Assessments Caused $2 Billion Shift in Property Taxes, Study Finds

Reddit News

Crack on Florida Bridge Was Discussed in Meeting Hours Before Collapse

Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach | News

Family of 4, including children, found dead in van in Garden Grove may have suffered carbon monoxide poisoning

In suit over New Iberia man shot dead while handcuffed, settlement reached with sheriff

Malibu in California bans plastic cutlery and straws

Reuters

Powerball jackpot climbs to $455 million for Saturday drawing

Trump consultants harvested data from 50 million Facebook users: reports

Sweden, North Korea talks end, may help pave way for Trump-Kim encounter

U.S. government to accept metals tariffs exclusion requests from Monday

Former FBI No.2 McCabe fired; says Trump administration targeted him

Reveal News

Nation’s largest janitorial company faces new allegations of rape

A group of janitors started a movement to stop sexual abuse

The Hate Report: How white supremacists recruit online

New documents about Jehovah’s Witnesses’ sex abuse begin to leak out

California is preparing to defend its waters from Trump order

The Altantic

West Virginia's Teachers Are Not Satisfied

This Average Joe Is the Most Quoted Man in News

The Unsinkable Benjamin Netanyahu?

Eric Garcetti Isn't Expecting Much From Washington

The Particular Horror of Church Shootings

The Guardian

Manchester United v Brighton: FA Cup quarter-final – live!

Trump lawyer calls for end to Russia investigation after McCabe firing

Mohamed Salah hits awesome four as Liverpool romp past Watford

Crack in Florida bridge deemed no concern just hours before collapse

Top seed Villanova restores order with Alabama rout to book place in Sweet 16

The Independent

Formula E: Jean-Eric Vergne wins in Uruguay as Sam Bird closes in on second place in drivers' championship

Gaza's Hamas rulers shut offices of mobile provider after explosion struck convoy carrying Palestinian prime minister

Manchester United vs Brighton LIVE: Latest score and updates

Salisbury Attack: Top Cold War diplomat criticises Gavin Williamson over 'go away and shut up' remarks

Six Nations: Wales secure runners-up spot with attritional win over France

The Intercept

The Hilarious, Terrifying, British “Death of Stalin” Shows How American Comedy’s Gone Wrong

Is Antifa Counterproductive? White Nationalist Richard Spencer Would Beg to Differ.

Democrats Want to Subpoena Apple to Find Out When Key Administration Officials Downloaded Encrypted Messaging Apps

How The New York Times Is Making War With Iran More Likely

Dismay in Ireland as Leader Who Promised to Confront Trump Boasts of Aiding Him

The Quartz

African leaders are pressing Europe to follow China’s lead by ending ivory trade

Why FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe got fired

American support for authoritarian rule has dropped for the first time in 23 years

Strongmen like Putin and Xi might seem all powerful—but they make their countries weaker

Confirmed: Trump Organization did negotiate with a sanctioned Russian bank in 2016

Wall Street Journal

Killing of Brazilian Activist Sparks Outrage and Protests

Progress Against HIV/AIDS Is Slowing Down. Young Women May Hold the Key.

How Hong Kong Makes Evading North Korea Sanctions Easier

Freed Saudi Media Mogul Touts New Business Ties With Government

Russia to Expel 23 U.K. Diplomats as Spy Row Intensifies

#news

0 notes

cristoph00cdc · 5 years

Video

CNN Right Now 12/20/2018 | CNN BREAKING NEWS Today Dec 20, 2018

http://myshare.link/vdl/dmlkbG94LnR2fHplZ2FwZGpwMmgwMA==# https://www.dropbox.com/home/THE%20ASYLUM%20FILES https://www.dropbox.com/sh/w2ybndydomhce8v/AAAEG40DFtZ3HLPvsOh8KbQia?dl=0 https://youtu.be/s9hBbq4P6U4 https://youtu.be/Hyxzci9Yc-s https://writerswrite000.wordpress.com/2017/11/29/emergency-sos-lawyer-extraordinaire-mr-denis-edney/ https://writerswrite000.wordpress.com/2017/12/03/a-hitch-in-my-giddiup-canadian-legal-system-a-world-exclusive/ https://writerswrite000.wordpress.com/2018/12/14/the-files-in-regards-to-asylum/ Embassy of the United States of America in Kuala Lumpur Kamala Shirin Lakhdhir Address: 376, Jalan Tun Razak, Taman U Thant, 50400 Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur Phone: 03-9212 6000 President Donald Trump The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 URGENT - DEATH IS UPON ME SEEKING ASYLUM IN THE USA - URGENT 2018-12-14 And I have no way to capture - the pain- the utter dehumanization - the fear - the anguish - I have no idea what to do. All I can do is try and stay alive long enough- i am trying to get - to the KL - AMERICAN EMBASSY. I MAY BE IN A WHEEL CHAIR. THE CANCER ? HAS STARTED - SO ? i AM IN TROUBLE. WHEN I ARRIVE AT THE EMBASSY - THIS ORDEAL IS WAY TOO MUCH - I WILL COLLAPSE - BUT NO ONE IS PREPARED FOR THIS EMERGENCY. IF YOU CAN - IF ITS BAD AS I IMAGINE - I MAY HAVE TO LEAVE - TO GET BACK TO BED. AND - WE CAN PROCEED - A BIT MORE SLOWLY AND COMPASSIONATELY. AS I CAN TRIGGER - A HEART ATTACK - OR THE TOXIC RASH CAN TAKE OVER - IT WILL BURN ME ALIVE - CAUSE MY CORNEAS TO RIP OPEN. CREATE THE HEART ATTACK - ALL VERY HARSH. ALL DEADLY, ALL YOU ARE NOT PREPARED FOR - WHICH MAKES IT DANGEROUS AND CRITICAL due to the amount of information generated by this ordeal - i had to put it on a flash drive. And wordpress - i am sorry to contact you and ask you to help save my life from trudeau and canada. President Donald Trump The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Sarah Huckabee Sanders @PressSec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_S._Tigar Due to the amount of information that I am forced to send to President Donald Trump @The White House. I realized that perhaps Sarah Huckabee Sanders may be the best person to assist in this. I am way to ill and face death. At times - i loose my sight - i become paralyzed - my heart was damaged - i have been bed ridden from januray 13th 2017. CANADA BETRAYED ALL CANADIANS VIA JUSTIN TRUDEAU PLEASE - PLEASE - DO NOT LET ME DIE- I BEG YOU https://www.cand.uscourts.gov/contact District Judge Jon S. Tigar San Francisco Courthouse, Courtroom 9 - 19th Floor 450 Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94102 Courtroom 9, 19th Floor Courtroom Deputy: William Noble Media & Public Outreach Lynn Fuller [email protected] https://youtu.be/k1CG-u9RCPw November 14th 2018 I am so sorry as I have been so ill - and could not - continue documenting. the only good news in this is that all costs - incurred by this - ordeal - can be collected from Canada. Justin Trudeau in 2019 will loose his reign in Canada. He is a criminal. A thief. Dr. Hedy Fry is an acolyte of Trudeau and though her portfolio as a MP - A doctor - who is supposed - to help people like me. She has stolen - as much as Trudeau. all my appeals were forwarded to the RCMP - ? She is a criminal and due to them - i will die unless - Donald Trump - intercedes and rescues me. I am too weak - to go into the Embassy here - I am trying to get better as I am sure your protocols - will cause me to collapse. I am afraid of dying - but I have contacted you many times. please help. Do not let me Die! SEEKING IMMEDIATE ASYLUM DUE TO BEING INFECTED WITH A KNOWN MALAYSIAN PLAGUE LIKE VECTOR. BOTH MALAYSIA AND CANADA REFUSED TO GIVE ME - MEDICAL TREATMENT. MALAYSIA AS THAT IS THERE PROTOCOL IF YOU ARE A VISITOR TO THIS COUNTRY AND CANADA DUE TO CANADA'S DEFUNCT CONSULAR INTERPRETATIONS - AND CANADA'S KINGS PREROGATIVE. AN EDICT THAT IS I DIRECT OPPOSITION TO THE CANADIAN CONSTITUTION AND HAS SENTENCED ME TO DEATH. I had to prepare this document in advance as the situation is so dire that my death if not treated in imminent. You are now intimately aware of the incredible fuktard that is Justin Trudeau. Canada's worst Prime Minister. He is not a punk kid - he is a dangerous criminal - a thief - and is hell bent on destroying Canada. He has signed of in allowing me to die, while pampering Canadian ISIS. He has given 20 Million to Crooked Hilary Clinton - call it Money laundering. I approached the Clinton foundation and was informed of the conflict of interest. They could not assist me as they were in bed with Justin Trudeau. Its very complicated, political and I may die. You must save my life. Please. DJT - YOU ARE RIGHT - I CONTACTED ALL HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS AND THEY DID NOTHING. I CONTACTED AMAL - GEORGE CLOONEY AND THE LAWYERS OF DOUGHTY STREET - I AM NOT ARAB ENOUGH - PUT I HAVE PLAYED 1 ON TV. I TRIED PUTIN - BUT AGAIN HAVING PLAYED RUSSIAN ON TV - FILM AND MY KIDS ARE HALF RUSSKIE - NADA. These organisations have never responded. I CONTACTED THE VATICAN - AS A DEVOTED CATHOLIC - BUT THE IMPOSTOR POPE - FRANCIS - IGNORED MY REQUEST. THE VATICAN OR THE POPE HAS DIRECT INFLUENCE ON THE LAWS USED BY THE HAGUE TO DEFEND HUMAN RIGHTS. SWEDEN SAID - BUT YOU ARE ONLY 1 PERSON APPLYING FROM CANADA. THE REALITY IS THAT THEY ARE OVER 6000 CANADIANS STUCK IN LIMBO WORLDWIDE - BUT I AM DYING FROM THE ASSAULT. HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH GRANTED THE MAPLE THRONE AND ITS OCCUPANT - UNPRECEDENTED POWERS THAT HAVE PLACED TRUDEAU ABOVE THE LAW. HENCE HE USES OLD LAWS TO KILL ME OFF? THESE LAWS ARE AGAINST THE CONSTITUTIONS OF CANADA. SO THERE ARE ONLY DEFENDED IN COURT. TRUDEAU WANTS ME DEAD. AS HE KNOWS THAT THESE COURTS ARE EXPENSIVE AND TAKE A LOT OF TIME AND ONLY LEGALLY DEFENDED- ACCESSIBLE THROUGH THE USA - RUSSIA - ITALY. Much of this document - i have published via wordpress. As i have lived in a state of collapse from this infection JANUARY 13, 2017- i was advised by Malaysians to alert - INTERPOL - SCOTLAND YARD ( THE RCMP) as to my impending death. Apparently that was the way to flag my passport and ensure i - if i died - would leave a trail of correspondence that establishes that I was murdered in Malaysia. https://writerswrite000.wordpress.com/2017/11/27/canadian-applying-for-urgent-asylum-canadas-deadly-kings-preoragative/comment-page-1/ The internet is full of memes - Gif - videos that document Justin Trudeau - bizarre life - https://youtu.be/Is3AncKX7sc https://youtu.be/K2KiTtsYnQI https://youtu.be/ldkBovxr2Kg I am establishing - that I have contacted every Canadian Authority and was ignored - as they are all funded by - the federal government - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_prerogative http://www.markedbyteachers.com/university-degree/law/the-royal-prerogative-remains-a-significant-source-of-constitutional-law-which-is-largely-immune-from-scrutiny-by-the-courts.html I had written to all these people - begging for help.

0 notes

studentofrhetoric-blog · 7 years

Text

Tuesday, April 11th, 2017

International News:

--- "Preparations began on Tuesday to move people out of two besieged pro-government Syrian towns and two opposition-held ones in a deal between the warring sides, a pro-government commander and a war monitoring group said. The Shi'ite towns of al-Foua and Kefraya in the northwestern province of Idlib are encircled by rebels, while the opposition towns of Zabadani and Madaya near the Lebanese border are under siege by pro-government forces including the Shi'ite group Hezbollah. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring group, said convoys were moving toward the four towns and evacuations were expected to start on Wednesday morning. A military commander in the alliance fighting in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said buses were on the way to the towns and that the combatants would also swap hostages under the deal. "It has been decided that tomorrow the agreement will be carried out," said the commander, a non-Syrian, speaking on condition of anonymity."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-deal-idUSKBN17D2GR?il=0

--- "Growing numbers of African migrants passing through Libya are traded in what they call slave markets before being held for ransom, forced labor or sexual exploitation, the U.N. migration agency said on Tuesday. West African migrants interviewed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) have recounted being bought and sold in garages and car parks in the southern city of Sabha, one of Libya's main migrant smuggling hubs. Migrants are traded for between $200 and $500 and are held on average for two or three months, Othman Belbeisi, head of the IOM's Libya mission, told journalists in Geneva. "Migrants are being sold in the market as a commodity," he said. "Selling human beings is becoming a trend among smugglers as the smuggling networks in Libya are becoming stronger and stronger."The migrants - many from Nigeria, Senegal and Gambia - are captured as they head north toward Libya's Mediterranean coast, where some try to catch boats for Italy."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-libya-idUSKBN17D1IB?il=0

--- "A year ago the view from Ugandan teacher Richard Inyani's mud hut was wilderness, land untouched since the 1990s and the murderous rampages of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army. Now it's a sprawl of tarpaulin shacks housing thousands of South Sudanese, refugees fleeing a three-year civil war that has triggered the biggest cross-border exodus in Africa since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. And they keep coming: Last week, more than 3,000 people arrived at the border in a single morning after an alleged massacre by South Sudan government troops in Pajok, a South Sudanese town with a population of some 50,000. Pajok is now empty, refugees say. The influx of refugees is testing Uganda's generosity. While Inyani is happy to help fellow Africans in their hour of need - many Ugandans, including President Yoweri Museveni, were once refugees themselves - he is less enthusiastic about the sea of U.N. blue-and-white on his doorstep. One top government official said that Uganda's system of accommodating refugees, routinely touted as one of the world's most progressive, was on the brink of "explosive" collapse. Uganda's system allows villagers in impoverished border regions to donate land to refugees on the expectation that the foreign donor funds that support the refugees will also help the villages in the form of shared public services such as schools, roads, wells and clinics. The problem is that aid flows are not keeping up with the scale of the exodus from South Sudan - at least 832,000 have arrived in Uganda since fighting erupted in July last year - and the system is tottering."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uganda-refugees-insight-idUSKBN17D20X?il=0

--- "U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson carried a message from world powers to Moscow on Tuesday denouncing Russian support for Syria's Bashar al-Assad, as the Trump administration took on America's traditional mantle as leader of a unified West. Tillerson flew on the administration's first cabinet mission to Russia after meeting foreign ministers from the Group of Seven advanced economies and Middle Eastern allies in Italy. They endorsed a joint call for Russia to abandon Assad...Western countries blame President Assad for the gas attack, and Trump responded by firing cruise missiles at a Syrian air base. Russian President Vladimir Putin has stood firmly by Moscow's ally Assad, who denies blame. "It is clear to us the reign of the Assad family is coming to an end," Tillerson told reporters in Italy before departing for Moscow. "We hope that the Russian government concludes that they have aligned themselves with an unreliable partner in Bashar Al-Assad." He said Russia had failed in its role as sponsor of a 2013 deal under which Assad promised to give up his chemical arsenal. "These agreements stipulated Russia as the guarantor of a Syria free of chemical weapons," Tillerson said. "It is unclear whether Russia failed to take this obligation seriously and whether Russia has been incompetent. But this distinction doesn't much matter to the dead. We can't let this happen again." Russia says the chemicals that killed civilians belonged to rebels, not to Assad's government, and has accused the United States of an illegal act of aggression against Syria on a phoney pretext. Putin said on Tuesday he believed Washington planned to launch more missile strikes, and that rebels were planning to stage chemical weapons attacks to provoke them. Putin said Moscow would urgently ask the United Nations chemical weapons watchdog to investigate last week's incident. Western countries have dismissed Russian suggestions that the poison gas belonged to rebels as beyond credibility...The United States, Britain and France have proposed a revised draft resolution to the 15-member U.N. Security Council that is similar to a text they circulated last week pushing Syria's government to cooperate with investigators, diplomats said."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-g7-foreign-syria-idUSKBN17D0GI?il=0

--- "Foreign ministers from Group of Seven (G7) major industrialized nations reached no agreement on a British suggestion that sanctions be tightened against Syria and Russia, Italy's foreign minister said on Tuesday. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson had said ahead of the two-day G7 meeting that he wanted to discuss imposing fresh sanctions over last week's alleged chemical weapons attack in a rebel-held area by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's air force...Italy, which hosted the G7 gathering in Tuscany, said the idea did not win broad support. "There is no consensus at this time for new sanctions as an efficient method to reach our goal," Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano told reporters. "There are obviously different opinions, and I am referring to my colleague Boris Johnson, who raised the issue," he said, adding: "The position of the G7 is very clear. We support the sanctions that have already been introduced. "Italian officials estimate that sanctions imposed on Russia after its 2014 annexation of Crimea have cost Italy some four billion euros in lost business, and Rome has pushed back on previous attempts to impose fresh penalties on Moscow...French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault suggested the question was given little attention by Johnson's counterparts from the United States, Germany, Canada, Italy, France and Japan. "The question wasn't mentioned by anyone, except Boris Johnson, but we didn't talk about it any further," Ayrault said."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-g7-foreign-syria-sanctions-idUSKBN17D1L5?il=0

--- "The Group of Seven nations will tell Russia to stop its "hypocrisy" in Syria and work with other countries to bring an end to the civil war, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said on Tuesday. "The G7 will tell Russia very clearly that this hypocrisy has to stop. It needs to genuinely and sincerely engage with the political process to get ourselves out of this situation we found ourselves in," he told reporters at the G7 meeting in Tuscany. He said the U.S. missile strike on a Syrian air base last week had opened a "small window of opportunity" to try to end the conflict."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-g7-foreign-syria-france-idUSKBN17D14H?il=0

--- "Tests on victims of a suspected chemical attack in Syria's northwestern Idlib province confirmed the use of sarin gas, Turkey's health minister Recep Akdag was quoted as saying on Tuesday by the state-run Anadolu news agency...Akdag was quoted as saying that isopropyl methylphosphonic acid "has been identified in the blood and urine tests conducted on samples taken from the victims exposed to chemical warfare in Idlib". The acid is formed from the degraded byproduct of sarin reacting with other compounds."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-turkey-chemical-idUSKBN17D1OL?il=0

--- "A failed asylum-seeker accused of ramming a truck into a Stockholm crowd last week, killing four people, has confessed to committing a terrorist crime, his lawyer said on Tuesday. Uzbekistan man Rakhmat Akilov, wanted for deportation at the time of Friday's attack, made his first court appearance, entering the heavily guarded courtroom with a green sweater over his head and flanked by his lawyer and a translator. Police say they believe the 39-year-old hijacked a beer truck and drove it into a busy pedestrian street in the Swedish capital before crashing into a department store. Two Swedes, a British man and a Belgian woman were killed in the attack. Fifteen were injured. Eight people remain in hospital, including two in intensive care. The attack has shattered any sense Swedes had of being insulated from the militant violence that has hit other parts of Europe, but has prompted defiance from Prime Minister Stefan Lofven who says Sweden will remain an open, tolerant society. Akilov, who was asked by the judge to remove the sweater from his head, made no comment at the start of the hearing. His lawyer, Johan Eriksson, told the court that his client had admitted the crime. The judge then ordered the hearing to proceed behind closed doors."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-sweden-attack-suspect-detention-idUSKBN17D0UD?il=0

--- "Far-right leader Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron are tipped to lead the first round of voting in France's presidential election with 23 percent each, pollsters Elabe said in a survey carried out for media groups L'Express and BFMTV. Both candidates were down half a point from a similar poll last week. Conservative Francois Fillon was in third place in the poll on 19 percent, ahead of far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon on 17, both unchanged. The top two candidates in the April 23 first round go through to a May 7 runoff. Testing a variety of hypothetical second-round matchups, the poll of around 1,000 voters found Macron would beat Le Pen, Fillon or Melenchon. Melenchon would beat Le Pen or Fillon, but lose to Macron. Fillon would beat Le Pen but lose to either of the other leading candidates."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-election-poll-idUSKBN17D1WL?il=0

--- "In a new twist in the two-round election, Jean-Luc Melenchon, a far-left veteran who for most of the campaign has been dismissed as a distant no-hoper, has surged into the top four and lies just a few percentage points behind the leaders. Though some commentators see Melenchon's challenge as a blip that may fade, his rise has injected further uncertainty into the outcome of the race for the Elysee, in which Macron has largely been seen as the favorite. Some investors are even weighing up the possibility of Melenchon making it into the second round against Le Pen, a clash between two far-left and far-right arch-rivals that would stand French politics on its head."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-election-idUSKBN17D18R?il=0

--- "The European Union on Tuesday extended until April 2018 sanctions against Iran for "serious human rights violations", a narrower measure than restrictions the bloc had already lifted after an international accord on Tehran's nuclear programme. The EU has pursued rapprochement with Iran since the 2015 nuclear deal, which reversed a decade of hard-hitting Western financial and trade sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Top EU officials have been shuttling in and out of Tehran since, often accompanied by large European business delegations. But the bloc has also extended by a year its travel ban and an asset freeze on 82 Iranian people and one entity, as well as a ban on exports to Iran of equipment for monitoring telecommunications and other gear that "might be used for internal repression.""

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-eu-idUSKBN17D1U1?il=0

--- "U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asked his European counterparts on Tuesday why American voters should care about the conflict in Ukraine, France's foreign minister said. The new U.S. administration under President Donald Trump has indicated it might be less engaged on the international stage than some of its predecessors, telling its allies that it would put U.S. interests first. French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Tillerson had openly questioned why "American taxpayers" should be concerned about Ukraine, which has been racked by a separatist conflict for the last three years. Ayrault told reporters he had replied: "It is in the interests of the U.S. taxpayers to have a Europe that is secure and is strong politically and economically ... You don't want a weak Europe, broken into bits and feeble.""

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/g7-foreign-ukraine-idUSKBN17D1P6?il=0

--- "Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko got assurances from U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that Washington will not allow any deal that links the fates of Ukraine and Syria, Poroshenko's office said in a statement on Tuesday. Poroshenko and Tillerson spoke by phone on the eve of Tillerson's visit to Moscow, which is set to be an early foreign policy test for the Donald Trump administration. Kiev is nervous at the prospect of Washington and Moscow cutting a deal behind its back over Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014, and Ukrainian territory seized by Russian-backed separatists. "Rex Tillerson emphasized that Washington will not allow any package deal as regards solution to the situation in Ukraine and Syria," the statement said."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-tillerson-ukraine-idUSKBN17D1RG?il=0

--- "Italy's President Sergio Mattarella urged Russia on Tuesday to use its influence with Syria to thwart any more chemical weapons attacks there. "We call on everyone, Moscow like everyone, to use their influence to avoid that such attacks are repeated," Mattarella said at a news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-usa-putin-mattar-idUSKBN17D1K0?il=0

--- "At the end of the week three-way talks are planned in Moscow between the foreign ministers of Russia, Syria and Iran, RIA news agency cited the Russian foreign ministry's spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-russia-iran-idUSKBN17D1JC?il=0

--- "Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem will travel to Moscow soon on an official visit, the RIA news agency cited the Syrian ambassador to Moscow as saying on Tuesday. Talks will focus on U.S. allegations of a poison gas attack in Syria's Idlib province and the subsequent U.S. missile strike on a Syrian air base, the ambassador was cited as saying."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-russia-visit-idUSKBN17D1GM?il=0

--- "U.S. President Donald Trump has not asked to meet Pope Francis during his visit to Italy next month for the Group of Seven summit, sources said on Tuesday, in what would be a highly unusual omission. Trump, who Francis suggested was "not Christian" if he wanted a wall on the Mexican border, is due in Sicily on May 26-27 for a meeting of the heads of the world's richest nations. The two men have diametrically opposing positions on immigration, refugees, climate change and unbridled capitalism. Trump called the pope's criticism of his plan to build the Mexico wall "disgraceful". U.S. presidents have in the past made a beeline for the Vatican while they were in Italy or Europe in order to meet with the head of the world's largest Christian church. Only one of them, John Kennedy, was a Roman Catholic..."The situation can change but are only six weeks left so it looks unlikely at this point," said a diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. A senior Vatican diplomatic source confirmed that the White House had so far made no approaches to the Holy See about a possible meeting, which would be the first between the two men...As a matter of policy, popes meet with any head of state who requests an audience, regardless of any differences they have. Besides being leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, the pope is a head of state. Such meetings allow for an exchange of views on world affairs and a chance for the pope to encourage ethical solutions to world problems."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/uk-pope-trump-idUSKBN17D1FF

--- "The Russian Defence Ministry said on Tuesday that two of its soldiers had been killed in a mortar attack in Syria and a third was fighting for his life, the RIA news agency reported. The ministry said that the Russian military instructors were embedded with a Syrian army unit and -- along with a Russian military adviser -- had come under mortar fire from a group of militants."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-russia-casualtie-idUSKBN17D1B5?il=0

--- "Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Tuesday that Ankara's findings showed the Syrian government still possessed chemical weapons capacity and urged for measures to prevent its potential usage. Speaking to state-run broadcaster TRT Haber in Italy, Cavusoglu also said a transition government was urgently needed in Syria and that risks of chemical weapons would continue as long as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad remained in power."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-turkey-idUSKBN17D0O1?il=0

--- "A senior Myanmar government official on Tuesday denied there was ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in the troubled northwestern state of Rakhine, where a military operation aimed at the minority has forced 75,000 people to flee to Bangladesh. Attacks on Myanmar border guard posts in October last year by a Rohingya insurgent group ignited the biggest crisis of country leader Aung San Suu Kyi's year in power. A UN report in February said Myanmar's security forces had committed mass killings and gang rapes against Rohingya during their campaign against the insurgents, which may amount to crimes against humanity...There is no ethnic cleansing of Muslim minority in Rakhine," Thaung Tun told a group of diplomats in Myanmar's largest city, Yangon. "It is a matter of people on different sides of the divide and the government is striving to overcome the situation and to close the gap." His comments come amid several ongoing investigations into the allegations, including one mandated by Suu Kyi's government and chaired by the vice-president and former head of military intelligence, Myint Swe."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-idUSKBN17D0N9?il=0

--- "Malaysia should investigate the possible transfer of funds to North Korea's leadership, the deputy home minister said on Tuesday, after Reuters reported that the head of a Malaysian conglomerate had for years funneled cash to Pyongyang. Reuters on Monday cited a North Korean defector as saying that Han Hun Il, the North Korean founding chief executive of Malaysia Korea Partners (MKP), had funneled money to Pyongyang's leadership, the central committee of the ruling Workers' Party, for the past two decades. MKP's bank subsidiary in Pyongyang is also under investigation by the United Nations for possible violations of sanctions barring foreign companies from setting up joint ventures with, or taking an ownership interest in, North Korean banks. The reports risk damaging Kuala Lumpur's reputation as a financial center, deputy home minister Nur Jazlan Mohamed told Reuters, and called on the central bank to investigate if there had been any misuse of the country's banking systems. "We have to investigate if, among other things, North Korea was using the friendship with Malaysia as a conduit for illicit activities," he said."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-malaysia-idUSKBN17D0E1?il=0

--- "Almost half of Germany's first-time voters back Chancellor Angela Merkel, a poll by the Forsa Institut showed on Tuesday, providing a strong backbone of support as she prepares to bid for a fourth term in September. Among all potential voters, conservative Merkel had 43 percent support, compared to 32 percent for Martin Schulz, the chancellor candidate for the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD). But that lead extended to 47 percent against 29 percent among those aged 18 to 21, the poll showed. "Young people know Chancellor Merkel, with whom they grew up," said Manfred Guellner, who heads the Forsa institute. He said the poll showed that "especially young people are looking for stability and continuity in these uncertain times.""

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-election-idUSKBN17D0SY?il=0

--- "The risk of mass starvation in four countries - northeast Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen - is rising rapidly due to drought and conflict, the U.N. refugee agency said on Tuesday. About 20 million people live in hard-hit areas where harvests have failed and acute malnutrition rates are increasing, particularly among children, it said. In South Sudan, where the United Nations declared famine in some areas in February, "a further 1 million people are now on the brink of famine", UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said. "We are raising our alarm level further by today warning that the risk of mass deaths from starvation among populations in the Horn of Africa, Yemen and Nigeria is growing," Edwards told a news briefing. "This really is an absolutely critical situation that is rapidly unfolding across a large swathe of Africa from west to east," he said. People are on the run within their countries and greater numbers of South Sudanese refugees are fleeing to Sudan and Uganda, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said. A preventable catastrophe, possibly worse than that of 2011 when 260,000 people died of famine in the Horn of Africa, half of them children, "is fast becoming an inevitability", Edwards said."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-africa-hunger-un-idUSKBN17D11R?il=0

--- "Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said on Tuesday he would press ahead with organising more anti-Kremlin demonstrations despite being jailed after orchestrating the biggest protests against the authorities in years. Navalny, who wants to run against Vladimir Putin for president next year, was speaking a day after being freed from jail where he spent 15 days for his role in big nationwide protests last month which ended with over 1,000 arrests. "I of course assess the March 26 action to be very successful," said Navalny, addressing his supporters in an online broadcast. "It was the first simultaneous action in towns since the 1990s. Despite the fact that the authorities tried to frighten everyone ... tens of thousands took to the streets. We need to continue." The demonstrations buoyed the liberal opposition's morale a year before a presidential election, but angered the Kremlin which dismissed them as an illegal provocation."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-navalny-idUSKBN17D0UL?il=0

--- "U.S.-backed forces fighting Islamic State in Syria advanced to within 2 km (1 mile) of a key stronghold near the jihadist group's de facto capital of Raqqa on Tuesday, and a counter-attack by the militants was repulsed, officials said. The multi-phased campaign by the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), backed by air strikes and military advisers from a U.S.-led coalition, ultimately aims to oust Islamic State from Raqqa. IS is also losing ground to U.S.-backed offensives in Iraq. Officials have given different estimates for how long the campaign will take, and the assault on Raqqa itself appears to have been delayed, after one high-ranking military official said it would begin at the start of April. Meanwhile the immediate goal is to capture the city of Tabqa, some 40 km (25 miles) west of Raqqa, and a nearby dam on the Euphrates river, an official for the Raqqa campaign said. "For now, the target in front of our eyes is the city of Tabqa, and the dam," Gharib Rasho, a media official for the campaign, told Reuters. He said the SDF had taken control of around 60 percent of the dam, after capturing its northern entrance last month. The SDF is made up of Syrian Arab and Kurdish forces, including a large contingent from the powerful Kurdish YPG militia."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-raqqa-idUSKBN17D1PX?il=0

--- "The movement of a U.S. Navy strike group toward the western Pacific Ocean is not tied to a specific event and is a prudent move, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Tuesday. "As far as the movement of the (Carl) Vinson, she is stationed there in the Western Pacific for a reason, she operated freely, up and down the Pacific, and she is just on her way up there because that is where we thought it was most prudent to have her at this time," Mattis told a Pentagon press briefing. "It is not a specific demand signal or a specific reason why we are sending her up there," Mattis said. The Carl Vinson will take more than a week to move toward the Korean peninsula, as concerns grow about North Korea's advancing weapons program."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-northkorea-pentagon-idUSKBN17D2LZ?il=0

--- "U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Tuesday that the United States' military policy in Syria had not changed and remains focused on defeating Islamic State militants even after the United States launched 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield last week."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-pentagon-idUSKBN17D2IM?il=0

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