By Maria Tsvetkova
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia has opened a criminal investigation against one of the country's top human rights lawyers who is defending jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) in an extremism case.
Security forces searched and briefly detained Ivan Pavlov on Friday before bringing him in for questioning again.
Pavlov, 50, is well known inside Russia for taking on high-profile and often politically sensitive cases in which he represents people accused by the Russian state of everything from treason to espionage.
The investigation into him follows mounting official pressure on the FBK, a Navalny-linked organisation that has produced a slew of high profile and sometimes embarrassing investigations into official corruption. Some of the targets of its exposes have sued it and disputed its findings.
It comes at a time when Navalny's movement and network of political campaign offices across Russia is under unprecedented pressure designed to end its activities.
In another setback for Navalny's team, Russia's financial monitoring agency said on Friday it had added his network of campaign offices to a list of organisations involved in "terrorism and extremism".
"I was interrogated as a suspect," Pavlov told reporters outside a hotel in Moscow. He walked out unguarded and headed to another interrogation with Russia's Investigative Committee.
Pavlov said he had been accused of disclosing classified information relating to an ongoing investigation against one of his clients, former journalist Ivan Safronov.
The Investigative Committee declined to comment.
A court later prohibited him from using the internet or a phone.
"ELEMENT OF PRESSURE"
Pavlov was due to lead a legal team representing the FBK in a court hearing considering a request from the Moscow prosecutor to declare the group an extremist organisation. The main hearing is scheduled for May 17.
The offence Pavlov is accused of is punishable by up to three months in jail, Pavlov's legal team said.
"Of course, this is an element of pressure because if he's found guilty of committing a deliberate crime he would be deprived of his lawyer status and therefore would not be able to continue his professional activity," said Dmitry Katchev, one of Safronov's lawyers.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "We don't have any information, we don't know the reason for the arrest and how it happened, what this lawyer is accused of."
Russian security forces also raided Pavlov's wife home and the office of his legal team in St Petersburg, his colleagues said on social media.
(Aadditional reporting by Dmitry Antonov, Alexander Marrow and Andrew Osborn; Editing by Tom Balmforth, John Stonestreet, Timothy Heritage and Richard Chang)
Cardinals and bishops will now be allowed to be tried by the Vatican’s lay criminal tribunal, according to a decree issued Friday by Pope Francis. Until now, the Catholic Church’s most senior officials accused of criminal offenses could only be tried by their peers in the "Corte di Cassazone" (Court of Cassation), which is presided over by a cardinal. On Friday, Francis changed the policy in a document named “motu proprio,” which amends the judicial system of the Vatican City State promulgated in March 2020, according to Vatican News. The new law makes clear that Vatican City State judges have...
SAN DIEGO — A son of Sinaloa cartel kingpin Ismael “El Mayo" Zambada pleaded guilty in San Diego federal court Friday to being a leader in the global drug-trafficking empire. The plea from Ismael Zambada Imperial, known by the nickname “Mayito Gordo," adds to the growing list of high-ranking figures to be convicted in the United States' decades long attempt to dismantle the cartel — still thought to be Mexico's most powerful even as its infamous co-leader, Joaquín “El Chapo" Guzman, serves a life sentence in Colorado. In his plea agreement, Zambada Imperial, 35, admitted to being a major coordi...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The United States needs to prepare for a potential future conflict bearing little resemblance to "the old wars" that have long consumed the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Friday in his first significant policy speech.
Austin called for harnessing technological advances and better integrating military operations globally to "understand faster, decide faster and act faster."
"The way we fight the next major war is going to look very different from the way we fought the last ones," Austin said during a trip to the Hawaii-based U.S. Pacific Command.
Austin did not explicitly mention rivals like China or Russia. But his remarks came as the United States starts an unconditional withdrawal from Afghanistan on orders from President Joe Biden aimed at ending America's longest war and resetting Pentagon priorities.
Austin acknowledged that he has spent "most of the past two decades executing the last of the old wars."
Critics say withdrawing from Afghanistan will not end the Asian country's internal conflict, extinguish the threat of terrorism or make experience from 20 years of counter-insurgency warfare irrelevant, as militant organizations like Islamic State spread around the world.
Austin's remarks did not appear to prescribe specific actions or predict any specific conflict. He instead appeared to outline broad, somewhat vague goals to drive the Pentagon under the Biden administration.
"We can't predict the future," Austin said. "So what we need is the right mix of technology, operational concepts and capabilities - all woven together in a networked way that is so credible, so flexible and so formidable that it will give any adversary pause."
Preventing a conflict would mean creating "advantages for us and dilemmas for them," he said.
U.S. responses could be indirect, he said, outlining a scenario in which cyber warfare could be used "to respond to a maritime security incident hundreds of miles away."
(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by David Gregorio and Leslie Adler)
Kabul (AFP) - The United States formally begins withdrawing its last troops from Afghanistan Saturday, bringing its longest war nearer to an end but also heralding an uncertain future for a country in the tightening grip of an emboldened Taliban.
US officials on the ground say the withdrawal is already a work in progress -- and May 1 is just a continuation -- but Washington has made an issue of the date because it is a deadline agreed with the Taliban in 2020 to complete the pullout.
The skies above Kabul and nearby Bagram airbase have been buzzing with more US helicopter activity than usual as the pullout gears up, following the start Thursday of a concurrent NATO withdrawal.
The prospect of an end of 20 years of US presence comes despite fighting raging across the countryside in the absence of a peace deal.
A stark reminder of what remains came late Friday with a car bomb in Pul-e-Alam, south of the capital, killing at least 21 people and wounding 100 more.
US President Joe Biden is determined to end what he called "the forever war", announcing last month that the withdrawal of the remaining 2,500 American forces would be complete by the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
"A horrific attack 20 years ago... cannot explain why we should remain there in 2021," he said.
Since the US withdrawal deal was struck the Taliban have not directly engaged foreign troops, but insurgents have mercilessly attacked government forces in the countryside and waged a terror campaign in urban areas.
The exit of US forces has only exacerbated the fear felt by ordinary Afghans.
"Everyone is scared that we might go back to the dark days of the Taliban era," said Mena Nowrozi, who works at a private radio station in Kabul.
"The Taliban are still the same; they have not changed. The US should have extended their presence by at least a year or two," she told AFP.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani insists that government forces -- who for months have carried out most of the ground fighting against the Taliban -- are "fully capable" of keeping the insurgents at bay.
He said the pullout also means the Taliban have no reason to fight.
"Who are you killing? What are you destroying? Your pretext of fighting the foreigners is now over," Ghani said in a speech this week.
Still, General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has not ruled out total chaos.
"On the worst-case analysis, you have a potential collapse of the government, a potential collapse of the military," he said earlier this week.
"You have a civil war and all the humanitarian catastrophe that goes with it."
Police officer Abdul Malik from the former insurgent bastion of Kandahar said they were prepared.
"We have to take care of our homeland... We will do our best to defend our soil," he told AFP.
The US-led military onslaught in Afghanistan began in October 2001 in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
Two decades later, and after the death of almost 2,400 Americans and tens of thousands of Afghans, Biden says the final withdrawal was justified as US forces had now made sure the country cannot again become a base for foreign jihadists to plot against the West.
Concerns are high that the Taliban might yet strike at retreating US forces, and in the southern province of Kandahar -- where the foes used to clash regularly -- security sources say several areas are laden with explosives planted by the insurgents.
"If the Taliban attack retreating US or allied forces, it would be to bloody the nose of a defeated enemy and to humiliate it further," said Afghanistan specialist Nishank Motwani.
Andrew Watkins, of the International Crisis Group, said the coming months would see the situation become a more purely local conflict.
"The United States and its NATO partners are stepping back and giving the two primary sides of this conflict... their first instance to fight with and assess their opponents without the extra factor of the United States," he said.
US senators said Friday that the government is investigating an apparent increase in mysterious directed-energy attacks dubbed "Havana syndrome", amid new reports of potentially brain-damaging incidents inside the country.
Democratic Senator Mark Warner and Republican Marco Rubio, who lead the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a statement after two media reports saying attacks had taken place in Washington, including just outside the White House, and in Miami, Florida.
"For nearly five years, we have been aware of reports of mysterious attacks on United States government personnel in Havana, Cuba and around the world," they said.
"This pattern of attacking our fellow citizens serving our government appears to be increasing."
The still unexplained attacks have caused sickness and even brain damage in US diplomats and intelligence officials in Cuba, China, Russia, and other countries.
Moscow is suspected to be behind them, even if the mechanism for them has yet to be explained. Scientists have theorized that the attacks arise from pulsed microwaves.
Earlier this week CNN, citing unnamed officials, said federal agencies were investigating a November 2020 incident at the White House Ellipse in which a national security council staffer was sickened.
A year earlier, according to reports, another White House official reported feeling some symptoms while walking her dog in the Washington suburb of Arlington.
And Politico reported Friday that government investigators are examining a suspected attack on US personnel in Miami last year.
Those affected experience similar symptoms reported in the original case affecting US diplomats in Havana in 2016.
Since the first attacks were reported in Cuba, and after that in China, scientists and doctors and debated the causes and effects, without a uniform conclusion.
CNN said some members of Congress had been informed of the more recent incidents in closed-door intelligence briefings.
Neither the White House nor Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines denied the reports when questioned this week.
Haines told the Senate Armed Services Committee she could not discuss the issue openly because it involved classified information.
Warner and Rubio said they welcomed renewed investigation by the CIA into the incidents, noting it was important "to better understand the technology behind the weapon responsible for these attacks."
"Ultimately we will identify those responsible for these attacks on American personnel and will hold them accountable," they said.
© 2021 AFP
In an op-ed published at The Independent, Kathleen Walsh contends that the public is missing the "real point" of the recent bombshell news story surrounding an alleged confession letter written by a friend of GOP Congressman Matt Gaetz, admitting that the two paid for sex with a woman who was 17-years-old at the time.
According to Walsh, the crux of the story is not the exchange of money, but "a powerful man preying on very young women and girls — which is still devastatingly common."
"While all but one of the women Gaetz is accused of paying were technically adults, many were still teens, all at least a decade younger than him, often in college," Walsh writes. "The issue is not that Gaetz allegedly paid for sex. The issue is that he, allegedly, pursued teen girls who could not have the influence, financial independence, or life experience they would have needed to enter into these transactions on an equal footing. If these allegations prove to be true — if Gaetz was secretly exchanging not just cash, but often necessities like rent and tuition money, for sex with girls who were barely 18 (and in one case 17) — then that is predation, not a mutually beneficial arrangement."
"As others have noted, the very idea that an adult can "have sex" with a 17-year-old is flawed. The correct term for such an activity would be 'rape,' because a 17-year-old child is still a child. By definition, a child is incapable of engaging in an adult, consensual sexual relationship. And the idea that a child should be the one apologizing to the adults who raped her — the idea that she is somehow the one who abused her own position — is on its face absurd," she wrote.
"Taken together, the implication is that Gaetz erred in entering a seedy underground world populated by tempting young women of loose morals, including the minor child he claims lied about her age. In reality, if the accusations are correct, Gaetz created this seedy underground world himself, recruited its inhabitants with care, and relished in his own power," she concluded.
Read the full op-ed over at The Independent.
Donald Trump spent the 2016 election repeatedly promising that he would build a majestic border wall -- and Mexico would pay for it. Like so many things Trump has said, it was a lie.
After being elected, Trump was unable to get Congress to provide the funding he had promised would come from Mexico, so he diverted billions from the Department of Defense.
On its 101st day in office, the Biden administration is now reversing course.
"Consistent with the president's proclamation, the Department of Defense is proceeding with canceling all border barrier construction projects paid for with funds originally intended for other military missions and functions such as schools for military children, overseas military construction projects in partner nations, and the National Guard and Reserve equipment account," Deputy Pentagon Spokesperson Jamal Brown said in a statement.
"Today's action reflects this administration's continued commitment to defending our nation and supporting our service members and their families," he added.
Acclaimed diplomat Henry Kissinger said Friday that US-China tensions threaten to engulf the entire world and could lead to an Armageddon-like clash between the two military and technology giants.
The 97-year-old former US secretary of state, who as an advisor to president Richard Nixon crafted the 1971 unfreezing of relations between Washington and Beijing, said the mix of economic, military and technological strengths of the two superpowers carried more risks than the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Strains with China are "the biggest problem for America, the biggest problem for the world," Kissinger told the McCain Institute's Sedona Forum on global issues.
"Because if we can't solve that, then the risk is that all over the world a kind of cold war will develop between China and the United States."
While nuclear weapons were already large enough to damage the entire globe during the Cold War, he said advances in nuclear technology and artificial intelligence -- where China and the United States are both leaders -- have multiplied the doomsday threat.
"For the first time in human history, humanity has the capacity to extinguish itself in a finite period of time," Kissinger said.
"We have developed the technology of a power that is beyond what anybody imagined even 70 years ago."
"And now, to the nuclear issue is added the high tech issue, which in the field of artificial intelligence, in its essence is based on the fact that man becomes a partner of machines and that machines can develop their own judgement," he said.
"So in a military conflict between high-tech powers, it's of colossal significance."
The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union during the decades after World War II was more one-dimensional, focused on nuclear weapons competition, said Kissinger, one of the leading strategic thinkers of the past six decades.
"The Soviet Union had no economic capacity. They had military technological capacity," he said.
"(They) didn't have developmental technological capacity as China does. China is a huge economic power in addition to being a significant military power."
Kissinger said US policy toward China must take a two-pronged approach: standing firm on US principles to demand China's respect, while maintaining a constant dialogue and finding areas of cooperation.
"I'm not saying that diplomacy will always lead to beneficial results," he said.
"This is the complex task we have... Nobody has succeeded in doing it completely," he said.
© 2021 AFP
WARSAW (Reuters) - An ancient Egyptian mummy once believed to be the remains of a male priest is actually the embalmed body of a woman in the third trimester of pregnancy, Polish scientists said on Friday.
Marzena Ozarek-Szilke, an anthropologist at the Warsaw Mummy Project, was examining a CT scan of a mummy at the National Museum in the Polish capital when she spotted something peculiar.
"When I looked at the lesser pelvis of our mummy I was interested in what was inside... I thought I saw a tiny foot," Ozarek-Szilke said.
She asked her husband, an archaeologist who also worked on the project, to take a look.
"My husband looked at the picture and as a father of three, he said: 'Well, that's a foot'. At that moment ... the whole picture started to come together," Ozarek-Szilke told Reuters.
The mummy came to Poland in the 19th century when the nascent University of Warsaw was creating an antiquities collection. For decades, it was thought the mummy belonged to an ancient Egyptian priest named Hor-Dehuti.
However, in a discovery revealed in the Journal of Archaeological Science on Thursday, scientists at the Warsaw Mummy Project said the mummy was in fact a woman in her twenties who was between 26 and 28 weeks pregnant.
The cause of death is not clear, but Ozarek-Szilke said the pregnancy may have had something to do with it.
"It is possible that the pregnancy itself contributed to the death of this woman. Now we have modern medicine, women who are between 20 and 30 weeks pregnant and something happens to the pregnancy, they have a chance to be rescued. It used to be impossible," she said.
The discovery sheds some light on the little-known role of children in ancient Egypt and the religious beliefs of the time, but also raises many questions, according to Wojciech Ejsmond, co-director of the Warsaw Mummy Project.
"What was the status of this child in the Egyptian religion? Did it have a soul, could it go to the afterlife on its own, could it be reborn in the afterlife... if it was not yet born?"
Ejsmond said scientists would study the mummy further to determine the cause of death and establish why the foetus was left in the body.
"We must be open to all possibilities," he said.
(Reporting by Alicja Ptak and Aleksanda Szmigiel; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
The Brazilian Amazon released nearly 20 percent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the last decade than it absorbed, according to a stunning report that shows humanity can no longer depend on the world's largest tropical forest to help absorb manmade carbon pollution.
From 2010 through 2019, Brazil's Amazon basin gave off 16.6 billion tonnes of CO2, while drawing down only 13.9 billion tonnes, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The study looked at the volume of CO2 absorbed and stored as the forest grows, versus the amounts released back into the atmosphere as it has been burned down or destroyed.
"We half-expected it, but it is the first time that we have figures showing that the Brazilian Amazon has flipped, and is now a net emitter," said co-author Jean-Pierre Wigneron, a scientist at France's National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA).
"We don't know at what point the changeover could become irreversible," he told AFP in an interview.
The study also showed that deforestation -- through fires and clear-cutting -- increased nearly four-fold in 2019 compared to either of the two previous years, from about one million hectares (2.5 million acres) to 3.9 million hectares, an area the size of the Netherlands.
"Brazil saw a sharp decline in the application of environmental protection policies after the change of government in 2019," the INRA said in a statement.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was sworn into office on January 1, 2019.
Terrestrial ecosystems worldwide have been a crucial ally as the world struggles to curb CO2 emissions, which topped 40 billion tonnes in 2019.
Over the last half century, plants and soil have consistently absorbed about 30 percent of those emissions, even as they increased by 50 percent over that period.
Oceans have also helped, soaking up more than 20 percent.
The Amazon basin contains about half of the world's tropical rainforests, which are more effective at soaking up and storing carbon that other types of forests.
If the region were to become a net source rather than a "sink" of CO2, tackling the climate crisis will be that much harder.
Using new methods of analyzing satellite data developed at the University of Oklahoma, the international team of researchers also showed for the first time that degraded forests were a more significant source of planet-warming CO2 emissions than outright deforestation.
Over the same 10-year period, degradation -- caused by fragmentation, selective cutting, or fires that damage but do not destroy trees -- caused three times more emissions than outright destruction of forests.
© 2021 AFP
The "Mayflower 400" -- the world's first intelligent ship -- bobs gently in a light swell as it stops its engines in Plymouth Sound, off England's southwest coast, before self-activating a hydrophone designed to listen to whales.
The 50-foot (15-metre) trimaran, which weighs nine tons and navigates with complete autonomy, is preparing for a transatlantic voyage.
On its journey the vessel, covered in solar panels, will study marine pollution and analyze plastic in the water, as well as track aquatic mammals.
Eighty percent of the underwater world remains unexplored.
Brett Phaneuf, co-founder of the charity ProMare and the mastermind behind the Mayflower project, said the ocean exerts "the most powerful force" on the global climate.
Rosie Lickorish, a specialist in emerging technologies at IBM, one of the partners on the project, said the unmanned craft provided an advantage in the "unforgiving environment".
"Having a ship without people on board allows scientists to expand the area they can observe," she told AFP.
A variety of technology and service providers have contributed to the project with hundreds of individuals involved from nations including India, Switzerland and the United States, said Phaneuf.
The project would have cost 10 times the roughly $1 million (820,000 euros) invested by ProMare without the "global effort," he added.
The non-profit venture will offer the data gathered by the project free of charge. The information could be of particular use to the future of commercial shipping.
The autonomous ship is scheduled to embark on May 15 if weather is favorable and permission is granted by British authorities.
The journey to Plymouth, Massachusetts -- the same voyage made by pilgrims on the original "Mayflower" in 1620 as they sought a new life in America -- will take three weeks.
While the Mayflower 400 voyage has been delayed because of the pandemic, Phaneuf said at least no one will fall ill on the trip.
"No one will get bored or tired or sick on this one. So it can take as long as it likes to do science," he said from the British port.
Sitting alongside him were three computer technicians checking the equipment remotely.
Meirwen Jenking-Rees, a 21-year-old student engineer, checked the ship's engines before it headed out for a sea trial.
Construction of the trimaran, which is automated from the robotic rudder that steers it to the diesel generator that supplements its solar power, took a year.
Developing its "smart captain", the onboard artificial intelligence, took even longer as the computer has had to learn how to identify maritime obstacles by analyzing thousands of photographs.
The "Mayflower 400" also had to be taught how to avoid collisions and first went to sea for "supervised learning".
Robotics and software engineer Ollie Thompson said that by running a "number of scenarios" the ship can learn "what are good actions, bad actions, so safe and unsafe".
So if it makes a mistake, the boat can correct itself "and then learn itself," he added.
The automated vessel uses its "eyes" and "ears" -- a sophisticated system of six cameras and radar -- to continue learning on its own.
Because of a lack of regulations around unmanned sailing, the Mayflower 400 is yet to be tested in rough seas or storms, a situation Jenking-Rees described as a "worst case scenario".
In simulated settings, however, the robotic craft has faced 50-metre waves.
Lickorish explained that the boat's artificial intelligence will be pivotal in conducting scientific experiments.
"It was trained with hundreds of hours of audio data," she said, "to detect the presence of marine mammals, recognise the marine mammals, and actually tell us something about population distributions out in the open ocean".
Analysing the chemical composition of the water, measuring sea levels and collecting samples of microplastics are the ship's other missions.
Similar robotic data collection has been ongoing in space for decades.
While the ship is totally autonomous, the team will monitor the ship 24 hours a day from England, ready to intervene remotely in case of danger.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in will visit US President Joe Biden in Washington on May 21, the White House said Thursday.
"President Biden looks forward to working with President Moon to further strengthen our alliance and expand our close cooperation," White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement.
"Moon's visit will highlight the ironclad alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea, and the broad and deep ties between our governments, people and economies," she said.
Moon will be the second world leader to visit the White House since Biden took office in January, after Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga met with the US leader earlier this month.
The meetings reflect Biden's priority on relationships with Asian allies as his administration continues to focus on competition with China.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin visited Seoul in March to reaffirm the two countries' united force against North Korea and Beijing's growing ambitions.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Moon called on Biden to re-open negotiations with Pyongyang on the denuclearization of North Korea.
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