Sarajevo School Renamed for Controversial Bosnian Who Backed Nazis
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Hundreds of thousands of peace marchers flooded the heart of Barcelona on Saturday shouting “I’m not afraid” — a public rejection of violence following extremist attacks that killed 15 people, Spain’s deadliest in more than a decade. Emergency workers, taxis drivers, police and ordinary citizens who helped immediately after the attack on August 17 in the city’s famed Las Ramblas boulevard led the march. They carried a streetwide banner with black capital letters reading “No Tinc Por,” which means “I’m not afraid” in the local Catalan language. The phrase has grown from a spontaneous civic answer to violence into a …
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Friday the alliance would closely watch Russian military exercises in western Russia and Belarus next month, urging Moscow to be transparent about the drills. The maneuvers, the largest in years, with tanks, naval and air units operating in and around the Baltic and North Sea, have raised NATO’s concern that the official number of troops participating might be understated. ‘Watching very closely’ “We are going to be watching very closely the course of these exercises,” Stoltenberg told reporters after meeting Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo on a visit to check on the deployment …
A man armed with a knife was detained Friday evening outside London’s Buckingham Palace, and two police officers were injured while arresting him, police said. The Metropolitan Police force says two officers suffered minor injuries while detaining the suspect, who is being held on suspicion of grievous bodily harm and assaulting police. Police said the officers did not require hospital treatment. No other injuries were reported. A large number of police vehicles could be seen in the Mall, the wide road outside the palace. Police said it was too early to say whether the incident was terrorism-related. Buckingham Palace is …
The suspected mastermind of an international drug-smuggling operation has been arrested in London and faces extradition to the United States on charges that carry at least 30 years in prison upon conviction, prosecutors in New York said Friday. Muhammad Asif Hafeez, 58, a Pakistani national known as “The Sultan,” was charged with trafficking several tons of heroin and methamphetamine, U.S. prosecutors said. He faces three counts in federal court in Manhattan, each with a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 10 years. Lawyers for Hafeez could not immediately be identified. Prosecutors said that from 2013 until his arrest, Hafeez conspired to …
Belgian soldiers shot dead a man in the center of Brussels on Friday evening after he came at them with a knife shouting Allahu Akbar (“God is great”), in a case authorities are treating as a terrorist attack. The man, a 30-year-old Belgian of Somali origin, died after being rushed to the hospital. The soldiers were not seriously hurt in the attack; one had a facial wound and the other’s hand was wounded. Prosecutors said the man, who was not known for terrorist activities, had twice shouted Allahu Akbar during the attack, which occurred at around 8:15 p.m. local time …
A court in Azerbaijan on Friday jailed the head of an independent news agency pending an investigation on tax evasion charges, a move that the opposition denounced as an attack on the freedom of speech in the ex-Soviet nation. The court in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, put Turan news agency director Mehman Aliyev in prison for three months. He was arrested on Thursday night. Tax authorities have accused Aliyev of failing to pay the equivalent of nearly $22,000 in taxes in 2014-2016. Turan has denied the charges. It said in a statement that its bank accounts have been …
A bus carrying construction workers drove off a pier in southern Russia on Friday, killing at least 16 people, officials said. The bus was carrying workers who were building a pier for an oil company on the Black Sea coast not far from Crimea, the Investigative Committee said. Several oil companies are drilling for oil off the Russian Black Sea coast. Official accounts of how many workers were on the bus that plunged into the sea changed several times Friday morning. By noon, the Emergency Situations Ministry said 41 people had been on the bus — the 16 people killed …
Norway and China have resumed talks on a bilateral free trade deal, Norway’s Industry Ministry said Thursday, in another sign that their relationship was thawing after a row over the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to dissident Liu Xiaobo. Beijing suspended discussions immediately after the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Liu in 2010. The dissident was jailed for 11 years in 2009 for “inciting subversion of state power” after he helped write a petition known as “Charter 08” calling for sweeping political reforms. Liu died on July 13 from liver cancer. China and Norway agreed to resume …
A new U.S. study has found an “extreme level” of wealth inequality in Russia that has increased much more significantly than it has in former Eastern European communist countries and in China since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The study, conduced by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found inequality in Russia has been driven by the transition from communism, during which wealthy Russians accumulated offshore wealth about three times larger than the net value of the country’s foreign reserves. This offshore wealth is comparable to all the financial assets held by households throughout Russia. …
U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday during a visit to Ukraine that the Trump administration was “actively reviewing” whether to provide lethal defensive weapons to the war-torn country. When asked whether Russia might see such a move as a threat, Mattis responded, “Defensive weapons are not provocative unless you’re an aggressor.” The previous U.S. administration held the view that sales of defensive lethal weapons to Ukraine would unnecessarily provoke Russia, but Trump administration officials have reopened consideration of the previously rejected plan. “The morality of doing something that would have a counterproductive result struck [President Barack] Obama as a …
Russian and U.S. officials traded accusations on Thursday over their respective policies in Afghanistan, pointing fingers of blame at each other. In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed regret that the main focus of U.S. President Donald Trump’s new Afghanistan strategy is “regulation by methods of force.” “We are certain this is a futile course,” Lavrov said. Asked for a response by VOA, a senior U.S. administration official said what Trump put forward Monday in a nationally televised address “is not a military-only strategy. There’s a strong diplomatic, political element, even economic element to the strategy. So, it’s just …
U.S. interim co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, Ambassador Richard Hoagland, is retiring on August 28. Announcing his plans at a roundtable discussion at the Washington Foreign Press Center, Hoagland, currently the State Department’s principal deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, said he will be replaced by Andrew Schofer, a career foreign service officer who most recently served as charge d’affaires of the U.S. Mission to the International Organizations in Vienna. “He has experience in the settlement of the Cyprus and other conflicts,” Hoagland said. “I think the Secretary of State and the State …
A Spanish High Court judge on Thursday ordered another one of the four suspects arrested over twin attacks in Catalonia last week, Salh El Karib, to be freed on certain conditions, according to a court source. El Karib ran an internet cafe in the northeastern Spanish town of Ripoll where most of the alleged members of the 12-strong cell lived. Investigating judge Fernando Andreu had originally asked for him to remain in police custody pending further investigation of his possible role in the attacks, which killed 15 people in Barcelona and the coastal resort of Cambrils. El Karib will have …
Two people were injured by an explosion in the center of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, on Independence Day, police said on Thursday. The blast occurred at 1406 (1106 GMT), police said in a statement, giving no more details. The local television channel 112 showed a woman lying on the ground in the street near the building of the Ukrainian government. …
Net migration to Britain has fallen to a three-year low as a growing number of European Union nationals left the country following last year’s Brexit referendum, according to official figures released Thursday. The figures from the Office for National Statistics provide evidence that the uncertainty and economic jitters caused by Britain’s vote to quit the EU are having an impact on immigration. The statistics office said net migration – the difference between arrivals and departures – was 246,000 in the year to March 31, a fall of 81,000 on a year earlier. More than half the change was due to …
Officials in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam on Wednesday canceled a performance by the American rock group Allah-Las following a tip from Spanish police that a terror attack might be imminent. Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb said at a hastily arranged news conference that police were questioning the driver of a van loaded with gas tanks that was found near the concert venue. The vehicle was registered in Spain. Concert organizer Rotown said on Twitter that the concert venue, a former grain silo and elevator called Maassilo, had been evacuated. The decision to cancel the event was made less than …
Spain’s northeastern region of Catalonia, hit last week by two Islamist militant attacks which killed 15 people, is to deploy more police, install bollards in Barcelona and step up security around stations and tourist landmarks. The aim is to strike a balance between security and not overloading residents with restrictions. “We’re looking at introducing [street] obstacles that could be mobile,” Joaquin Forn, who is in charge of home affairs in Catalonia, told a news conference on Wednesday. A van plowed into crowds of tourists and local residents on Barcelona’s crowded Las Ramblas boulevard last Thursday, killing 13 people. Two others …
Britain will set out a plan to cooperate closely with Europe on data protection rules after it leaves the European Union, hoping to reassure businesses and law enforcement agencies that there will be no disruption to exchanges of information. Minister for Digital Matt Hancock said Britain was leading the way on data protection laws and had worked closely with its EU partners in developing standards. “We want the secure flow of data to be unhindered in the future as we leave the EU,” he said. “So a strong future data relationship between the U.K. and EU, based on aligned data …
Protecting people rather than property or animals will be the priority under pioneering new German legal guidelines for the operation of driverless cars, the transport ministry said on Wednesday. Germany is home to some of the world’s largest car companies, including Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW, all of which are investing heavily in self-driving technology. German regulators have been working on rules for how such vehicles should be programmed to deal with a dilemma, such as choosing between hitting a cyclist or accelerating beyond legal speeds to avoid an accident. Under new ethical guidelines — drawn up by a government-appointed committee …