Month: March 2019

Britain will hand diplomatic protection to British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to underline the government’s belief that Iran has behaved unjustly in its treatment of her, foreign minister Jeremy Hunt said on Thursday. Hunt said while the move, a little-used way for governments to seek protection on behalf of their nationals, was unlikely to be a “magic wand,” it may help Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case. Iran’s ambassador in London said on Twitter that Britain’s move “contravenes international law.” Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in April 2016 at a Tehran airport as she headed back to Britain …

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President Donald Trump and Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis now have another thing in common: They both like the same campaign slogan. Babis said Thursday at the White House that he similarly wants to “Make the Czech Republic great again.” The two leaders already have much in common. Babis, like Trump, is a wealthy businessman who rode into office on a nationalist-style campaign. While Trump is dogged by special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, Babis is facing charges of misusing European Union subsidies for a farm he transferred to relatives, including his son. Trump wants to strengthen the U.S. border …

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Russia’s leading telecoms firm said Thursday it had agreed to pay $850 million to settle a U.S. corruption case over huge bribes paid to the family of Uzbekistan’s former president. The case shed light on massive corruption in Uzbekistan under former president Islam Karimov, who ruled the ex-Soviet republic from 1990 until his death in 2016. MTS, based in Moscow and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, said the settlement had been agreed with the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The deals “mark the closure of the investigations into the company’s acquisition and …

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The Inter-Parliamentary Union finds more women around the world are winning seats in their national parliaments, with the best gains being made in countries that have well-designed quota systems. The report finds women’s representation in national parliaments rose by nearly 1 percentage point last year to 24.3 percent. This may seem a modest increase, but this figure indicates an ongoing upward trend of women’s participation in politics since the 1995 World Women’s Conference in Beijing. At that time, only 11 percent of women were in parliament. Their share has now more than doubled. IPU Secretary-General Martin Chungong says he also is …

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French citizen Mehdi Nemmouche was convicted of “terrorist murder” on Thursday for shooting dead four people in a Jewish museum in Brussels after coming back from Syria in 2014, the federal prosecutor’s spokesman said. Sentencing after the two-month-long, Brussels jury court trial, which underlined the threat posed by European jihadists returning home after fighting in Syria’s war, will be announced at a later date. Nemmouche, 33, remained silent in the dock as former hostages of Islamic State militants as well as victims of the May 2014 museum attack testified against him, though he took the stand briefly on Tuesday to …

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Local officials and human services workers in the southern Italian region of Calabria say the Italian government’s recently adopted security decree, which abolishes two years of humanitarian protection for asylum seekers, will do nothing but create greater insecurity. They say migrants not only helped re-populate empty classrooms but brought new work to locals. Caulonia, Stignano and Riace are just some of the towns in Italy’s southern and depressed region of Calabria that had benefited from the arrival of migrants on Italian shores. But for the many who arrived here after difficult sea crossings, there are new uncertainties. A security decree …

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The lower house of Russia’s parliament has passed two bills that restrict online criticism of the government and authorizes the imposition of jail sentences or fines on those who publish erroneous information about the authorities. The State Duma passed the measures Thursday and they are expected to be approved quickly in the upper chamber, after which they would be presented to President Vladimir Putin to be signed into law. The laws call for people found guilty of publishing “indecent” material that demonstrates “disrespect for society, the state [and] state symbols of the Russian Federation” and government officials to be penalized. …

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