Monthly Archive 28/09/17

Turkey says it would release American Pastor Andrew Brunson, who has been detained for nearly a year, if the United States extradited Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames for last year’s failed coup attempt.

“They say ‘give us the pastor’.  You have a preacher [Gulen] there. Give him to us, and we will try [Brunson] and give him back,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a televised speech.

Brunson, who has lived in Turkey for 23 years, and his wife, Norine, were arrested for alleged immigration violations in October 2016.  She was released, while his charges have been upgraded to supporting Gulen’s network, which Turkey has labeled a terrorist organization.

The couple ran a Christian church in the Aegean city of Izmir.

Norine met with U.S. Secretary of State of Rex Tillerson during his visit last month to Ankara. Tillerson said then that Brunson had been “wrongfully imprisoned”.

A decree last August gave Erdogan the power to extradite foreigners in exchange for Turkish prisoners abroad in “situations where it is necessary for national security or in the country’s interests.”  Turkey has repeatedly asked the United States to extradite Pennsylvania-based Gulen, accusing him of organizing the failed military coup last year.

U.S. relations with Turkey have soured recently over a number of issues, including what the U.S. sees as Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian rule.
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Drones will help deliver toothbrushes, deodorant and smartphones to Swiss homes this fall as part of a pilot project, the first of its kind over a densely populated area.

Drone firm Matternet, based in Menlo Park, California, said Thursday it’s partnering on the Zurich project with Mercedes-Benz’s vans division and Swiss e-commerce startup Siroop. It’s been approved by Switzerland’s aviation authority.

Matternet CEO Andreas Raptopoulos says the drones will take items from a distribution center and transport them between 8 to 16 kilometers to awaiting delivery vans. The van drivers then bring the packages to homes. Raptopoulos says drones will speed up deliveries, buzzing over congested urban streets or natural barriers like Lake Zurich.

The pilot comes as Amazon, Google and Uber have also been investing in drone delivery research.
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Even as Kurds celebrated the overwhelming approval of an independence referendum, Iraq took actions to punish the would-be breakaway state, vowing to shut down its airspace and join Turkey in holding military exercises.

Calling the vote “unconstitutional,” Iraq’s parliament on Wednesday also asked Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to send troops to the oil-producing, Kurdish-held region of Kirkuk and take control of its lucrative oilfields.

It told the 34 countries that have diplomatic missions in Kurdistan to shut them down, and it urged Abadi to enforce a decision to fire Kirkuk Governor Najmaldin Karim for holding the vote and deploy forces to areas that were under Iraqi government control before the fall of Mosul to Islamic State over three years ago.

“We will enforce federal authority in the Kurdistan region, and we already have starting doing that,” Abadi said.

The referendum isn’t binding, but it is the first step in a process that clearly leads in that direction, despite strong criticism from Iraq, its neighbors — particularly Iran and Turkey — and the United States.

These nations have described it as destabilizing at a time when all sides are still fighting against IS militants.

Turkish troops are conducting military exercises at the Iraqi border, and Iraqi soldiers joined in four kilometers from the Habur border gate between the two countries. National and international media observed the exercises from the main highway leading to the border gate.

Turkey, which has its own restive Kurdish minority, is particularly concerned about the independence movement sweeping into its territory. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned that all military and economic measures are on the table against the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), calling the decision to go ahead with the vote a “betrayal to Turkey.”

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Omer Merani, the Ankara representative of Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party, has been asked to not return to Turkey.

“If the KDP’s representative were here, we would ask him to leave the country,” Cavusoglu said. “We have instead said, ‘Don’t come back,’ because he is currently in Irbil.”

The Kurds, who have ruled over an autonomous region within Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, consider Monday’s referendum to be a historic step in a generations-old quest for a state of their own. It was approved by 92.7 percent of voters, and residents headed to Kirkuk’s citadel to celebrate late Wednesday after the results were released.

Iraq said it would close international airspace Friday over Kurdistan’s two airports — Irbil and Sulaimani — at 6 p.m. Domestic flights were allowed to continue. Most of Iraq’s neighbors, including Turkey, Egypt and Iran, said they would abide by the restriction and suspend flights there.

Qatar Airways will continue operations “as long as airways are open and we can transport our passengers safely,” according to CEO Akbar Al Baker, Reuters reported.

Maulood Bawa Murad, Kurdistan’s transportation minister, said Baghdad’s efforts to take over the airports would hurt the U.S. support missions for the fight against IS and that it would bode badly for the possibility of negotiations with Iraq.

“If this decision is meant to punish the people of Kurdistan for holding a referendum on its independence and deciding its fate, no talks with [Baghdad] will reach a conclusion,” Murad said.

While opposing the referendum, the U.S. said Iraq’s moves weren’t “constructive” to resolving the situation.

Senator Bob Corker, a Republican from Tennessee who was recently in Kurdistan, said he was disappointed with the decision to hold the vote despite calls for a delay. He said he hoped officials there would proceed in a “cautious and thoughtful manner.”

“I don’t like the destabilizing effects it could have on Iraq and the elections that will take place next year,” Corker said. “It’s going to bring a lot of issues. The Kurdish people have been great friends of our country. They’ve helped so much to fight against ISIS.”

VOA’s Kurdish, Turkish and Urdu services contributed to this report.
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The South American trade bloc Mercosur could seek trade deals with Canada, Australia and New Zealand this year, an Argentine official said Wednesday, as largest members Brazil and Argentina seek to open their economies.

Mercosur, which also includes Uruguay and Paraguay, is working with the European Union to finalize the political framework for a trade deal this year, at a time when the United States under President Donald Trump has been shying away from trade.

“There is a possibility that Mercosur starts negotiations with Canada, Australia and New Zealand this year,” Argentine Commerce Secretary Miguel Braun said at the Thomson Reuters Economic and Business forum in Buenos Aires.

“Integrating ourselves with these countries takes us in the direction we want to go,” he said, pointing to developed economies with high salaries. Argentina alone is seeking a trade agreement with Mexico, and Braun said it was also working on a trade agreement with Chile that would “deepen what we already have.”

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet said in New York last week that Santiago was finishing a trade liberalization agreement with Buenos Aires to boost trade and open opportunities for investors.
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Facebook said on Wednesday its efforts to fight fake news during Germany’s national elections included taking down tens of thousands of fake profiles in the final month of the campaign.

Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy for Europe, Middle East Africa, said the Silicon Valley-based company mounted an array of efforts to ensure the social media network was not used as a platform to manipulate public opinion.

“These actions did not eliminate misinformation entirely in this election but they did make it harder to spread, and less likely to appear in people’s News Feeds,” the Facebook executive said in a statement. News feed is the central feature in user profiles whereby they can see updates from people they follow.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union secured victory in Sunday’s balloting with fewer votes than expected, forcing her to enter complicated coalition talks with various parties to form a new government.

The company said it made a stronger push to remove fake accounts when it observed suspicious activity following widely reported foreign interference in the French and U.S. presidential elections over the past year.

Besides seeking to encourage civic participation and voter education efforts, it also worked closely with authorities, including the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), to monitor security threats during the campaign.

A variety of German political experts and social media watchers had given the campaign largely a clean bill of health in terms of any wide-scale efforts to swing votes in the run-up to voting day.

 
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U.S. President Donald Trump has come out unequivocally in favor of Spanish unity, just days before voters in the Catalan region are slated to vote on independence from Madrid.

At a joint news conference Tuesday with Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in a sweltering White House Rose Garden, Trump said he would bet most Catalonians want unity.

“I’m just for a united Spain,” Trump said. “I really think the people of Catalonia would stay with Spain. I think it would be foolish not to.”

Trump’s comments appear to go against official U.S. government policy. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said this month the United States would not take a position on the Catalan vote.

The Catalan government is pushing ahead with preparations for Sunday’s vote, even after the government declared the balloting illegal and Spain’s Constitutional Court suspended the referendum law.

The Spanish leader, speaking after Trump, cautioned Catalan separatists not to push ahead with their independence plans.

“The decision to unilaterally declare independence is not a decision I would make,” Rajoy told reporters. “It’s a decision which will have to be made or not by the Catalan government. I think it would be very wrong.”

The prime minister said holding a referendum next Sunday would be impossible.

“There isn’t an electoral committee, there isn’t a team at the Catalan government organizing the referendum, there aren’t ballots, there aren’t people at the voting stations — so it’s just crazy,” he said.

Rajoy said under those circumstances, the result would not be valid, and would only be a distraction.

“The only thing it’s doing is generating division, tensions, and it’s not contributing in any way to the citizens’ situation,” he said.

Trump said he could not predict whether the referendum would be held, even as he follows developments in the independence-minded province.

“I’ve been watching that unfold. But it’s actually been unfolding for centuries and I think that nobody knows if they’re going to have a vote,” he said.

“I think the president [Rajoy is considered president of the Spanish government] would say they’re not going to have a vote, but I think that the people would be very much opposed to that,” Trump told reporters. “I can say only speaking for myself, I would like to see Spain continue to be united.”

Catalonia divided

Opinion polls suggest that Catalonia’s population of more than 7 million is divided on the independence question. Catalan officials have said they would declare independence within days if voters approve the referendum.

At Tuesday’s news conference, Rajoy, whose country was victimized by an Islamic State-sponsored attack in August that killed 16 people in the Catalan capital, Barcelona, said he and Trump had spent a considerable amount of their meeting talking about terrorism.

“We’ve been hit by jihadi terrorist attacks on our soil,” he told reporters, noting that the two countries cooperate closely on anti-terrorism strategies. “We still need to do a lot in the area of intelligence, we need to improve coordination mechanisms in the area of cybersecurity or preventing recruitment and financing of terrorists.”

Rajoy also expressed support for Trump’s tough response to North Korea’s provocative nuclear missile tests, despite fears in some quarters that it could lead to war.

“No one wishes war anywhere in the world,” Rajoy said. “But it’s true that the recent events in North Korea, with implications in the neighboring countries, very important countries, it means that we all have to be forceful.

“Those of us who defend the values of democracy, freedom and human rights have to let North Korea know that it isn’t going anywhere in that direction,” the Spanish leader said.
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Spain’s government said on Tuesday police would take control of voting booths in Catalonia to help thwart the region’s planned independence referendum that Madrid has declared illegal.

The dispute has plunged Spain into one of its biggest political crises since the restoration of democracy in the 1970s after decades of military dictatorship.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has said the referendum is against the law and the constitutional court has ordered it be halted while its legality is determined. Catalonia’s separatist government, however, remains committed to holding it on Sunday.

Rajoy, speaking on Tuesday alongside U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, said it would be “ridiculous” if the affluent northeastern region declared independence from Spain.

Trump said he opposed the referendum and wanted a united Spain. “I really think the people of Catalonia would stay with Spain. I think it would be foolish not to,” he told reporters.

Senior Spanish government officials said on Tuesday authorities had done enough to prevent a meaningful referendum as Catalonia lacked an election commission, ballot boxes, ballot papers, a transparent census and election material.

Logistics have been dismantled

“Today we can affirm that there will be no effective referendum in Catalonia. All the referendum’s logistics have been dismantled,” the Spanish government’s representative in Catalonia, Enric Millo, told reporters in Barcelona.

Catalonia’s prosecutor has ordered the regional police — known as the Mossos d’Esquadra — to take control of any voting booths by Saturday, a spokesman for the Madrid government’s Catalan delegation said.

In an order to police issued on Monday, the prosecutor’s office said they would take the names of anyone participating in the vote and confiscate relevant documents.

Anyone in possession of the keys or entrance codes to a polling booth could be considered a collaborator to crimes of disobedience, malfeasance and misappropriation of funds, the order said.

Unrelenting opposition

The Madrid government has in recent weeks taken political and legal measures to prevent the referendum by exerting more control over the use of public funds in Catalonia and arresting regional officials. Hundreds of police reinforcements have been brought into Barcelona and other cities.

Madrid has also threatened fines against bureaucrats working on the ballot, including the region’s election commission, which was dissolved last week.

These actions have provoked mass demonstrations and drawn accusations from Catalan leaders that the Madrid government was resorting to the repression of the Franco dictatorship.

Catalan government to hold election

A “yes” vote is likely, given that most of the 40 percent of Catalans who polls show support independence are expected to cast ballots while most of those against it are not.

But the unrelenting opposition from Madrid means such a result would go all but unrecognized, potentially setting up a new phase of the dispute.

The Catalan regional government, which plans to declare independence within 48 hours of a “yes” victory, maintained on Tuesday the vote will go ahead and it sent out notifications to Catalans to man polling booths across the region.

Many had not yet received information about where or when they would be working after the state-run postal service was ordered to stop all mail related to the vote, a parliamentary spokeswoman for one separatist party said.
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French President Emmanuel Macron offered an ambitious vision for European renewal Tuesday, calling for the EU to work more closely on defense and immigration and for the eurozone to have its own budget, ideas he may struggle to implement.

In a nearly two-hour speech delivered two days after the German election in which Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU/CSU bloc scored its worst result since 1949, limiting her freedom to maneuver on Europe, the 39-year-old French president held little back in terms of sweep, self-assurance and aspiration.

But at a time when Europe is beset by tensions between east and west and battling to overcome nearly a decade of draining economic crisis, Macron’s earnest and at times high-brow discourse ran the risk of falling on deaf ears.

Speaking at the Sorbonne, he portrayed Europe as needing to relaunch itself, saying that on issues as diverse as asylum, border protection, corporate tax, intelligence sharing, defense and financial stability it needed much deeper cooperation.

“The only path that assures our future is the rebuilding of a Europe that is sovereign, united and democratic,” the former investment banker and philosophy student said, flanked by a French and a European Union flag.

“At the beginning of the next decade, Europe must have a joint intervention force, a common defense budget and a joint doctrine for action.”

Germany’s limitations

In his run for the presidency, Macron made European reform a central plank of his centrist campaign, and he and Merkel have spoken frequently about their desire for France and Germany, the European Union’s two largest economies and often its engines of change, to take the lead on integration.

But five months into his five-year term, Macron faces the threat that Merkel, 63 and looking to start her fourth term, has less capacity to move than either would have hoped.

Her alliance is still the largest bloc in the Bundestag, but to build a working majority she will likely have to form a coalition with the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), who are opposed to many of Macron’s ideas.

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, a senior member of the Social Democrats (SPD), hailed Macron’s speech “a passionate plea against nationalism and for Europe.”

“He can count on us,” said Gabriel, whose party has ruled out being part of a new grand coalition.

Rather than tailoring his speech to fit the contours of what the FDP, the Greens or Merkel may have wanted to hear, Macron kept his vision broad and far-reaching, while also detailing some specific ideas for an improved eurozone.

“A budget can only go hand in hand with strong political leadership led by a common [finance] minister and a strong parliamentary supervision at the European level,” he said, emphasizing the need for democratic accountability.

The fiscally conservative FDP dislikes the idea of a eurozone budget or any facility that may lead to financial transfers from wealthier eurozone countries to poorer ones, as well as the possibility of national debt being pooled.

The party has also called for phasing out Europe’s ESM bailout fund, which Macron wants to turn into a European Monetary Fund, and wants to see changes to EU treaties that would allow countries to leave the eurozone.

“You don’t strengthen Europe with new pots of money,” Alexander Lambsdorff, an FDP member in the European Parliament, said on Twitter in reaction to Macron’s speech.

In a statement issued by the FDP in Berlin, Lambsdorff said: “The problem in Europe is not a lack of public funds, but the lack of reform. A euro zone budget would set exactly the wrong incentives.”

2024 goal

Not shying away from addressing Germany directly even as it tries to resolve the fallout from Sunday’s election, Macron set an objective that the two countries completely integrate their markets and corporate rules by 2024.

“We share the same European ambitions and I know her commitment to Europe,” he said of Merkel. “I’m proposing to Germany a new partnership. We will not agree on everything, not immediately, but we will discuss everything.”

In Berlin on Monday, Merkel said it was important to move beyond catchphrases and provide detail on how Europe could be improved. It was not immediately clear whether Macron had managed to go beyond slogans as far as Merkel was concerned.

But Martin Selmayr, the chief of staff of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, said the proposals to reinforce the eurozone would be discussed alongside Juncker’s own at a eurozone summit planned for December.

Italy’s EU affairs minister, Sandro Gozi, said the speech would inspire European leaders into action.

“An excellent speech by Emmanuel Macron on reviving the European Union. Let’s work on this together, starting tomorrow at the Lyon Summit,” he said, referring to a meeting of the Italian and French leaders to discuss industrial policy.

Macron said he hoped his ideas would be taken into account in Germany’s coalition building negotiations. Those talks are not expected to begin until mid-October and may take several months.

“Some had said I should wait for the coalition talks to be concluded,” Macron said, adding had he done so, the reaction in Berlin would have been: “Your proposals are great but it’s too late, the coalition deal already lays out what will we do on Europe for the next four years.”
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Russia has threatened to ban Facebook from operating in the country if it does not comply with a law regarding the storage of user data.

The law, passed in 2014, requires telecommunication companies to store the personal data of Russians inside Russia.  It has been criticized as a way for the Russian government to force companies to hand over data on users.

The head of Roskomnadzor, the government’s telecoms watchdog, Alexander Zharov, told reporters, “The law is compulsory for all.  We will work on getting Facebook to observe the law.  This will all happen in 2018 definitely.”

Should Facebook choose not to comply with the law, Zharov said the company would be banned from Russia.

Last year, Russian authorities banned the professional networking website LinkedIn after they said the company violated Russian law.

Facebook is used heavily by Russian opposition groups to organize protests and share political messaging.

The announcement by Russian authorities comes several days after Facebook revealed that accounts with alleged Russian ties were used to post ads related to the 2016 U.S. election.

Facebook has said it would share those ads with U.S. authorities.

 
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