A US court has ordered the deportation of a former Nazi prison guard who had been living in the United States since 1959, the Department of Justice said Thursday.
Friedrich Karl Berger, who served in the Neuengamme Concentration Camp system, was stationed near Meppen, Germany where prisoners were held in "atrocious" conditions and worked "to the point of exhaustion and death," immigration judge Rebecca Holt found.
Her opinion followed a two-day trial in which Berger, now in his 90s, admitted he had prevented prisoners from fleeing the Meppen camp.
Berger was ordered deported for his "service in Nazi Germany in 1945 as an armed guard of concentration camp prisoners," the Department of Justice said.
As allied troops advanced at the end of March 1945, Nazis abandoned the Meppen camp. According to the court, Berger escorted prisoners to the Neuengamme main camp, a two-week trip during which 70 died.
"Berger was part of the SS machinery of oppression that kept concentration camp prisoners in atrocious conditions of confinement," said Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski.
In 1979, the US government created the Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations dedicated to finding Nazis, which has helped to deport 67 people, its director Eli Rosenbaum told AFP.
Berger's Nazi case was "possibly the last" in the United States, Rosenbaum said, adding that for prosecutors of such cases, "the biggest enemy ... is time."
If Berger appeals, his deportation could be delayed for several years and considering his advanced age could mean he dies in the United States.
The details into how Berger was identified as a former Nazi prison guard remain under seal.
The last such deportation was of 95-year-old former SS guard Jakiw Palij, who had lived in New York since 1949 and was expelled in August 2018.
Dubai's ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum ordered the abduction of two of his daughters and subjected his former wife to a "campaign of fear and intimidation", forcing her to flee to London with their two children, according to a British court ruling made public on Thursday.
Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein, 45, fled the United Arab Emirates last April having become "terrified" of her husband, who is also the vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates.
Soon afterwards, the 70-year-old sheikh applied for their two children -- a son aged eight and a 12-year-old daughter -- to be returned to the Gulf kingdom.
But Princess Haya, a half-sister of Jordan's King Abdullah II, applied for the children to be made wards of court and filed a non-molestation order for herself.
She asked during a London hearing for a judge to make findings of fact about the kidnapping and forced detention of two of the sheikh's adult daughters from a previous marriage.
She also alleged she had faced a "campaign of fear and intimidation" since she left last year.
- Seized and detained -
Sheikh Mohammed, who owns the Godolphin horse racing stable, tried to prevent two of the court rulings being made public.
But the Supreme Court rejected his application on Thursday morning, allowing them to be published.
Judge Andrew McFarlane, who heads the Family Division of the High Court of England and Wales, found Sheikh Mohammed "ordered and orchestrated" the abduction of Sheikha Shamsa from the UK city of Cambridge when she was 19 in August 2000.
She was forcibly returned to Dubai and "has been deprived of her liberty for much, if not all, of the past two decades", he said.
He also found Shamsa's sister, Latifa, 35, was seized and returned to Dubai twice, in 2002 and again in 2018.
She was held "on the instructions of her father" for more than three years after the first attempted escape. Her second made global headlines in March 2018.
Claims by a friend of Latifa who helped her escape that Indian special forces boarded a boat off the Indian coast on March 4, 2018 before she was returned to Dubai were also found to be proven.
"She was pleading for the soldiers to kill her rather than face the prospect of going back to her family in Dubai," McFarlane said.
"Drawing these matters together I conclude, on the balance of probability, that Latifa's account of her motives for wishing to leave Dubai represents the truth.
"She was plainly desperate to extricate herself from her family and prepared to undertake a dangerous mission in order to do so."
- Secret divorce -
Lawyer Charles Geekie, representing Princess Haya, said at a hearing last November that his client had been left anonymous notes threatening the lives of her son and daughter.
She also told the court of "deliberate threats" and even of a helicopter landing outside her house when the pilot told her he had come to take a passenger to a desert prison.
The court was also told the sheikh divorced Princess Haya without her knowledge on February 7, 2019 -- the 20th anniversary of the death of her father king Hussein of Jordan.
Judge McFarlane said it was "clear the date will have been chosen... to maximise insult and upset to her".
He agreed with Geekie that events since 2000 showed "a number of common themes, at the core of which is the use of the state and its apparatus to threaten, intimidate, mistreat and oppress with a total disregard for the rule of law".
"I also accept Mr Geekie's submission that these findings, taken together, demonstrate a consistent course of conduct over two decades where, if he deems it necessary to do so, the father will use the very substantial powers at his disposal to achieve his particular aims."
- One-sided -
In a statement after the publication of the rulings, Sheikh Mohammed strongly denied the claims and said the case involved "highly personal and private matters relating to our children".
He said he appealed to the Supreme Court "to protect the best interests and welfare of the children".
"The outcome does not protect my children from media attention in the way that other children in family proceedings in the UK are protected," he said, calling the process one-sided.
"As a head of government, I was not able to participate in the court's fact-finding process."
Australia's Great Barrier Reef is in danger of a catastrophic bleaching event that scientists warn could have dire consequences on the survival of one of the seven natural wonders of the world.
"It's a sobering reality we're in," Georgia Institute of Technology coral reef scientist Kim Cobb toldVice.
Temperatures in the waters surrounding the reef have been high in recent weeks, part of the months-long heatwave that brought devastating fires to Australia that ringed the country in December, forcing thousands from their homes and killing millions of animals. The fires were followed by massive flooding in February.
As Maddie Stone reported for Vice, the heat has led to a dangerous situation for the survival of the reef:
For the past few weeks, the Great Barrier Reef has been running a fever, with temperatures along the 1,400 mile-long ecosystem hovering a degree Celsius or more above normal. At these temperatures, corals become stressed and start to bleach, jettisoning the colorful algae that provide them their food and turning a bloodless white. If the water remains warm for too long, the algae won't return, and the corals will starve.
Experts worry the Great Barrier Reef is now uncomfortably close to that tipping point.
NOAA's Coral Reef Watch Program expects widespread bleaching, the organization said, from the north to the south of the reef.
"You're looking at a bigger, more widespread event," program director Mark Eakin told Vice.
Imaging from the organization shared by James Cook University Coral Reef Studies director Professor Terry Hughes on Twitter showed the increase in temperature.
"More widespread than 2016 or 2017, but hopefully not quite as intense," said Hughes. "I'm particularly concerned about the south, which has not been exposed to widespread bleaching before."
As Common Dreamsreported in February, scientists observing the rising sea temperatures around the reef described the situation then as on "a knife edge."
"We've found that one of the most worrying impacts of climate change has already begun."
A new study published Wednesday adds to mounting evidence that the world's tropical forests could soon stop serving their climate crisis-mitigating role of carbon sinks.
"After years of work deep in the Congo and Amazon rainforests, we've found that one of the most worrying impacts of climate change has already begun. This is decades ahead of even the most pessimistic climate models," said Simon Lewis, a senior author of the study and a professor from the School of Geography at the U.K.'s University of Leeds.
"There is no time to lose in terms of tackling climate change," said Lewis.
The findings, published in the journal Nature, represent the collaborative effort of roughly 100 institutions in which researchers tracked some 300,000 trees spanning 565 patches of undisturbed tropical forests across Africa and the Amazon over a 30-year period.
Researchers used measurements of tree growth and death, along with CO2 emissions, rainfall, and temperatures, to estimate carbon storage or "sequestration."
"We show that peak carbon uptake into intact tropical forests occurred in the 1990s," said lead author Wannes Hubau of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium.
At that time, the forests were able to store 46 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, representing about 17% of human-made carbon dioxide emissions.
Fast forward to the 2010s, and the researchers found the amount dropped to an estimated 25 billion tonnes, on par with roughly 6% of human-made carbon dioxide emissions.
Over the 30 years, the area of intact forest shrunk by 19% but global carbon dioxide emissions soared by 46%, the researchers noted.
The downward trend of carbon absorption didn't happen in the zones at the same time, the study also found. The downward trend of sequestration hit the Amazon in the mid-1990s and the African forests about 15 years later.
The potential for the Amazon forests to switch from carbon sink to carbon source isn't far off, with the study predicting it could happen as soon as the mid-2030s.
Hubau, in his statement, stressed need for ongoing monitoring "as our planet's last great tropical forests are threatened as never before."
For the moment, at least, humanity should still consider tropical forests carbon sponges. But, if urgent and bold measures aren't taken soon, that could well change.
"Intact tropical forests remain a vital carbon sink but this research reveals that unless policies are put in place to stabilize Earth's climate it is only a matter of time until they are no longer able to sequester carbon," said Lewis, pointing to the possibility of a feedback loop being triggered.
"One big concern for the future of humanity is when carbon-cycle feedbacks really kick in, with nature switching from slowing climate change to accelerating," Lewis said.
The bottom line for global governments is clear.
"By driving carbon dioxide emissions to net-zero even faster than currently envisaged, it would be possible to avoid intact tropical forests becoming a large source of carbon to the atmosphere. But that window of possibility is closing fast," said Lewis.
Professor Douglas Sheil at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, a contributing researcher to the study, put the findings in stark terms.
The Brazilian economy slowed in President Jair Bolsonaro's first year in office, according to official data released Wednesday, disappointing news for markets that had bet on the far-right leader to engineer an economic take-off.
Brazil's economy, the largest in Latin America, grew 1.1 percent in 2019, down from 1.3 percent in each of the previous two years, said the national statistics institute, IBGE.
Growth for the fourth quarter of the year came in at 0.5 percent.
Bolsonaro, who has been dubbed a "Tropical Trump," took office on January 1, 2019, after storming to a shock election win in a Brazil fed up with corruption scandals and coming off a brutal recession.
Brazil's economy had its worst-ever recession in 2015 and 2016, shrinking a whopping 3.5 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively.
"We have had three years of positive results since, but GDP has still not recovered from the drop of 2015 and 2016, and is at the same level as the first quarter of 2013," IBGE official Rebeca Palis said in a statement.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain who ran as a political outsider -- despite having served 28 years in Congress -- vowed during his presidential campaign to jump-start the economy, winning the support of the business sector.
Giving his economic guru Paulo Guedes vast power at the head of the economy ministry, he began implementing a sweeping agenda of pro-market reforms, austerity cuts and privatizations, including a long-sought pension reform that passed in October.
- Tough 2020 ahead -
Soon after Bolsonaro took office, analysts forecast economic growth of 2.5 percent for the year.
The final figure came in at barely half that.
"It was a cold bath of reality," said economist Victor Beyrute of Guide Investimentos.
"Brazil is going through a transition period, and the problem can't be solved in a year."
And 2020 is shaping up to be another tough year for Brazil, the world's ninth-biggest economy, according to International Monetary Fund figures.
Consulting firm Capital Economics said the latest data "masked a sharp loss of momentum late in the quarter," and warned of "growing headwinds from the effects of the coronavirus."
The government's current forecast is for 2.4-percent economic growth this year, but markets are predicting 2.17 percent. Capital Economics revised its own forecast down to 1.3 percent.
Brazil, which has confirmed two cases of the new coronavirus, is particularly exposed to the economic impact of the disease because of its close ties with China, its largest trading partner.
It also ended 2019 with a string of disappointing news.
Industrial production shrank 1.1 percent for the year after two years of growth, and big companies snubbed a major auction of Brazilian oil blocks in November over concerns about transparency.
- Rate cut? -
The central bank said Tuesday it was "closely monitoring the impacts of the coronavirus outbreak," and was prepared to cut its benchmark interest rate again when it meets later this month.
The bank has already cut the rate to a series of record lows in a bid to revive economic growth.
It lowered it to 4.25 percent in February, the fifth straight decrease since July 2019.
At the time, it indicated the loosening cycle was coming to an end, but its new statement made clear it was considering another rate cut.
Almost 300 million students worldwide faced weeks at home with Italy the latest country to shut schools over the deadly new coronavirus, as the IMF urged an all-out global offensive against the epidemic.
More than 95,000 people have been infected and over 3,200 have died worldwide from the virus, which by Thursday had reached some 80 countries and territories.
In California, Governor Gavin Newsom declared an emergency following the state's first coronavirus fatality -- raising the US death toll to 11 -- and a cruise ship was kept offshore after passengers and crew members developed symptoms.
Switzerland reported on Thursday its first death from the outbreak, a 74-year-old woman, while Bosnia confirmed its first two cases.
AFP / John SAEKI I will survive: but for how long?
The vast majority of global deaths and infections are in China, where the virus first emerged late last year, prompting the country to quarantine entire cities, temporarily shut factories and close schools indefinitely.
As the virus has spread, other countries have also implemented extraordinary measures, with UNESCO saying Wednesday that 13 countries have closed schools, affecting 290.5 million children, while nine others have implemented localised closures.
While temporary school closures during crises are not new, UNESCO chief Audrey Azoulay said, "the global scale and speed of the current educational disruption is unparalleled and, if prolonged, could threaten the right to education."
JIJI PRESS/AFP / STR In Japan nearly all schools are closed through March and spring break
Italy on Wednesday ordered schools and universities shut until March 15, ramping up its response as the national death toll rose to 107, the deadliest outbreak outside China.
South Korea -- second to China in terms of infections with cases jumping past 6,000 on Thursday -- has postponed the start of the next term until March 23.
In Japan, nearly all schools are closed after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for classes to be cancelled through March and spring break, slated for late March through early April.
Schools have also shut in Iran, where 92 people have died from the disease.
- Economic threat -
The German health minister said the outbreak was now a "global pandemic" -- a term the World Health Organization has stopped short of using -- meaning the virus is spreading in several regions through local transmission.
AFP / Miguel MEDINA People arrive at a pre-triage medical tent in front of Cremona hospital in Italy, where the virus death toll has risen above 100
Thousands of people were stranded on the Grand Princess off the California coast Wednesday as officials delayed its return to carry out tests on people on board.
A 71-year-old man who had been aboard the same ship during its previous voyage to Mexico died after contracting COVID-19.
The vessel belongs to Princess Cruises, the same company which operated a coronavirus-stricken ship held off Japan last month on which more than 700 people on board tested positive, with six dying from the disease.
Infections are now rising faster abroad than they are in China, where 31 more deaths and 139 new cases were reported Thursday. China's toll now stands at 3,012, with over 80,000 infections.
AFP / NOEL CELIS AFP reporters saw a handful of people trickling back into Wuhan, the city at the centre of the coronavirus epidemic
AFP reporters even saw a handful of people trickling back into Wuhan, the quarantined city at the centre of the epidemic, at the train station this week.
Beijing is now concerned about importing cases, with 20 infections brought from abroad so far -- prompting several cities to require people arriving from hard-hit countries to go into self-quarantine.
Japan announced Thursday that a state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping this spring has been postponed because containing the epidemic was "the biggest challenge" for the two countries.
Stock markets have rumbled over fears of recession, but Asian shares rallied on Thursday after a surge on Wall Street buoyed by global stimulus measures.
AFP / Justin TALLIS Near empty shelves on the toilet paper aisle in a supermarket in London after stockpiling by consumers
The IMF said it was making $50 billion in aid available for low-income and emerging-market countries to fight the epidemic, which it sees as a "serious threat" that would slow global growth to below last year's 2.9 percent.
"At a time of uncertainty... it is better to do more than to do not enough," IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva said.
In the United States, lawmakers reached a deal to provide more than $8 billion to fight the outbreak.
- No kissing -
Governments are scrambling to contain the spread of the virus.
Japan will quarantine all arrivals from China and South Korea for two weeks, the Yomiuri daily reported, without specifying when the measures will take effect.
Saudi Arabia has suspended the year-round Islamic "umrah" pilgrimage, an unprecedented move that raises fresh uncertainty over the annual hajj.
New measures in Italy -- where 11 towns with 50,000 have been under quarantine -- include a month-long nationwide ban on fan attendance at sports events, and advising people to avoid greetings like kissing on the cheek or shaking hands.
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said Italy could contain the outbreak for now, but if there is "exponential growth, not just Italy but any other country in the world would not be able to manage the situation".
Italy on Wednesday closed all schools and universities until March 15 as the number of deaths from the new coronavirus in the Mediterranean country hit 107.
The measure is the most restrictive response to COVID-19 of any European nation and tougher than the closure of schools—but not universities—taken by fellow Group of Seven (G7) member Japan.
Italy reported 28 more deaths on Wednesday—the highest single day total to date. The nation of 60 million people has now recorded over 3,000 cases and only trails China in terms of total fatalities.
The government’s other measures included an unpopular month-long nationwide ban on fan attendance at football matches and other major sporting events.
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte told the nation that Italy was able to handle the current number of cases but needed a firmer response to keep things from spiralling out of control.
“As long as the numbers are low, the health system can assist (people) effectively,” Conte said in a video message posted on Facebook.
“But in case of exponential growth, not just Italy but any other country in the world would not be able to manage the situation.”
First death in south
Italy has borne the brunt in Europe of a disease that is now spreading across the world faster than it is in the central Chinese region where it was first detected late last year.
The problem for the Italian government is that existing restrictions—including a quarantine of 11 towns with 50,000 people in the north—have failed to stop the outbreak.
The overwhelming majority of the fatalities have occurred in Milan’s Lombardy region and the neighbouring northern area around the cities of Bologna and Venice.
But 21 of the 22 regions have now had cases and infections are slowly reaching Italy’s less wealthy and developed south.
The government reported the first death south of Rome on Wednesday. It came in the Puglia region that surrounds the city of Bari in the heel of the Italian boot on the map.
Top government minister spent hours huddling Wednesday to chart a way out of a health crisis that threatens to tip Italy’s wheezing economy into recession and overwhelm hospitals.
Most of the steps adopted involve ways to avoid crowds and keep people from coming in contact with each other outdoors.
Crowd control
The new instructions urge people to stay at least a metre (three feet) apart and to avoid crowded places whenever possible.
Traditional greetings of kissing on the cheeks or shaking hands are strongly discouraged.
Exhibits and shows will be rescheduled—a measure that will be especially painful for Italy’s already hard-hit hotel and restaurant industry.
Some of the government’s more mundane and common-sense measures include advice to cough and sneeze in a handkerchief to avoid hands coming in contact with “respiratory secretions”.
Italians are also being urged to avoid sharing bottles and not to drink from the same cups and glasses.
The crowd-control measures will most directly affect football matches and could cause the most resentment in the sports-mad nation.
Italy’s Serie A has already been thrown into disarray by two weeks of postponements that have seen some clubs not play at all and others play multiple matches in a week.
Fans are even being prohibited from attending the training sessions of top teams such as Cristiano Ronaldo’s Juventus in Turin.
The government also recommended to those over 75 to stay indoors and to avoid public places. The advice extends to those who are at least 65 and suffer from other ailments.
A top civil protection official told AFP that most of those who have died in the past few days were in their 80s and 90s and were already suffering from other pathologies.
All these measures are meant to stay in place for a month and be reviewed and possibly fine-tuned after two weeks.
In the summer of 1940, millions of Parisians fled the French capital in a matter of days to escape the advancing German army. Eighty years after “l’exode de Paris”, an exhibition at the Liberation of Paris Museum puts a neglected part of French history in the spotlight.
Bumper to bumper, roads thick with vehicles and their human cargo, they fled in the millions. Some wheeled bicycles laden with possessions. Others carried cardboard suitcases bound with string. Children helped push carts piled high with bags and bedding. Others carried canaries in cages or were covered in heavy fur coats.
Two million Parisians poured out of the capital in the early days of June 1940, swelling the numbers of those already on the road to eight million, a mass movement of people that promptly became known as “the exodus”.
The Parisians had packed in a panic, fleeing the advancing German army. They’d seen footage of the bombings in Spain. They’d heard the rumours about the Germans – that they were vicious brutes who would rape the women and cut their children’s hands off. And many were still traumatised by the memories of the First World War, when France’s Western Front saw years of trench warfare and the deaths of 1.3 million men.
The affluent residents of the city's 8th and 16th arrondissements (districts) were the first to leave. They fled by car with their mattresses tied to the roofs. Others sat tight and waited for instructions from their bosses. But soon, they too, gripped by the contagious fear, packed up and left, seeking to put as much distance between themselves and the Germans as possible.
Only the elderly and the infirm remained, along with those, such as Paul Léataud, who were “determined to stay” and didn’t want “to risk finding nothing left when I get back”.
It vividly captures the scenes of chaos. Photos showing station platforms thick with people trying to catch the last trains out of Paris sit alongside children’s drawings of the crowds at Gare de Lyon.
Harried mothers push bicycles laden with children, crowds gather outside makeshift evacuation notices and newspapers – which were briefly obliged to suspend printing – report on the escalating German offensive throughout Europe.
Some scrawl graffiti on walls: “We lost Robert, Going to Poitiers”. Others recalled forgotten children crying by the side of the road or brutality encountered on the route. Some remembered lying face down in ditches or hiding in the woods to cheat death.
The refugees “brim over the pavements and appear to want to fill houses to bursting. All vestiges of apathy, reserve and self-control have gone", recalled Jean-Marc de Foville.
Photos of children carrying gas masks sit alongside aerial shots of a deserted, silent Paris as a seemingly endless line of people snaked out of the capital, and French democracy crumbled in a matter of days.
For the government, taken by surprise by the advancing German army, had made no official evacuation plan.
For months, ever since France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, the Western Front had sat quiet and the so-called “phoney war” had lulled the French into a false sense of ease.
But on May 10, the Germans invaded Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. On June 3, Paris was bombed for the first time. A week later, the Germans were just 30 kilometres from Paris and the government packed up and left, leaving the Parisians to fend for themselves.
“It wasn’t France’s finest hour,” said Hanna Diamond, the exhibition’s curator and author of “Fleeing Hitler: France 1940.”
“People were abandoned,” said Diamond, who explained that the exodus had been “glossed over” and buried in the events that followed, the more heroic narratives of Occupation, Resistance and Liberation.
“However we look at it, nobody knew what to do – the government fled… Who wants to hear about a humiliating defeat?”
Once out of the city and when the panic began to dissipate, some refugees described an almost holiday-like feeling of being on the road, a buoyancy that quickly faded when the petrol ran out and food supplies ran short. Cars were abandoned, railway stations were stacked high with lost property, and fur coats were of no use in those warm June days.
Mothers became separated from their children, handing over exhausted toddlers to soldiers in lorries, or to others offering lifts, only to find that soldiers took a different path to the one they had expected.
The Red Cross estimated that some 90,000 children were separated from their parents during the exodus. Family reunions were made even harder to organise by the fact that many of the children were too young to communicate much about their parents, and the babies could say nothing at all.
Some officials, like Jean Moulin, the prefect in Eure-et-Loir, in Chartres, in whose memory the Liberation of Paris Museum is named, refused to leave his post.
Some refugees and French soldiers pillaged villages to survive. Others took advantage of the refugees streaming south with farmers selling glasses of water to those on the road.
But no one exploited the exodus more than Marshal Philippe Pétain, who became chief of state of Vichy France and collaborated with the Nazis in sending thousands of French Jews to the death camps in the years that followed.
‘My heart goes out to you’
As France was poised to fall to the Germans and the refugees continued to make their way south, Pétain was appointed prime minister of France. On June 22, 1940 he signed an armistice with Germany, offering collaboration between the Nazis and his newly appointed Vichy regime, established when the government relocated from Paris to the southern city of Vichy.
But in the uncertain days of June 1940, Pétain, known as the “Lion of Verdun” after his legendary role in the First World War, reassured the refugees that he was with them in their hour of need.
“‘You know, my heart goes out to you, refugees on the road. I'm here with you. I'm not like some who’ve gone to England,” said Pétain, in a dig at Charles De Gaulle, who led French opposition to the Nazis from London. “I’m here, I'm sharing this with you.”
Understanding the exodus is key to understanding the Vichy regime, explained Diamond, for whom the flight from Paris was a “foundational myth”.
“Pétain was this very well-established figure – and people thought, ‘Now the war is over for us, it’s a return to order’. They didn't know that that would mean an authoritarian regime and German occupation at the time, they were just terribly relieved that their ordeal was coming to an end, and we can really understand that.”
“He did milk it – he was very good at that,” said Diamond, who added that the archives contain hundreds and hundreds of letters from women writing to Pétain during the Vichy regime asking him to be their child’s godparent.
In the days that followed the signing of the armistice with Germany, refugees began to think about going home. Local governments, overwhelmed by the flood of refugees, encouraged them to do so.
A deserted Paris met with no resistance when it fell to the Germans on June 14, 1940. The refugees returned to the French capital to find German troops marching down the Champs-Élysées and swastikas adorning government buildings – and braced themselves for the next chapter in their wartime history: five years of occupation under German rule.
In the Palestinian village of Ain al-Beida, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's surprise election win has raised fears among residents that their land may be annexed.
The 70-year-old right-winger campaigned on building thousands of new settler homes in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, as well as extending Israeli sovereignty into the Jordan Valley.
"Of course we are afraid they will annex these lands," said 85-year-old Majed Abu al-Hajj, pondering what restrictions await outside the confines of his home and small garden.
Final results from Monday's election are still pending, but Netanyahu's Likud along with its allies are currently three seats short of a majority in Israel's parliament, the Knesset.
It remains unclear if the prime minister, who is under criminal indictment on corruption charges, will be able to form a government.
Equally uncertain is when he would move to annex the Jordan Valley if he secures a new term.
The strategically important region makes up about a third of the West Bank and Palestinians say without it their hopes of a future state are dashed.
The roughly 1,600 residents of Ain al-Beida, in the northern West Bank and part of the Jordan Valley, said they suspect Israel will annex their land, even if they don't know so for sure.
They said more than half of Ain al-Beida's original land of around 600 hectares is already under the control of Israeli settlers or companies.
US President Donald Trump's widely-criticised peace proposals, unveiled in January, gave Israel the green light to annex the Jordan Valley and all settlements into Israel.
The plan was immediately rejected by the Palestinians, who accused Trump of blatant pro-Israel bias.
The Trump proposal called for a technical committee to finalise the details of annexations. Netanyahu said that committee has already started work.
"We know that Netanyahu promised his voters to annex about 40 percent of the West Bank," al-Hajj said.
"Nothing is in our hands."
- Palestinian anger -
Senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat told AFP Tuesday there could be "violence and bloodshed" if Israel proceeds with annexation plans.
The same day, several Israeli trucks carried tanks down a main street in the Jordan Valley.
Despite lacking a parliamentary majority, Netanyahu is expected to be selected by the president to attempt to form an administration after his Likud party won 36 seats, its best-ever performance with him as party leader.
Professor Eugene Kontorovich, director of international law at the right-wing Israeli Kohelet Policy Forum, said the election results would embolden Netanyahu to follow through with annexation.
"The overwhelming majority of those elected support application of Israeli law to Israeli communities," Kontorovich, who advised the US administration in the drawing up of its peace proposals, said.
"The notion he lacks a mandate for this has been dispelled."
International powers have for decades called for the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel -- the two-state solution, though Trump's full-blooded support for the Jewish state has fractured that consensus.
Hugh Lovatt, Israel-Palestine analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank, warned Israel annexing the Jordan Valley would be seen by many in the international community as not just "pushing a two-state solution beyond reach, but also crossing the threshold into apartheid."
Kontorovich said Netanyahu would simultaneously be seeking to form a coalition and progress with annexation.
"If Netanyahu can form a government quickly that will probably speed up the other process. But I think a couple of months is probably about the right timeframe (for annexation)."
In the Jalazone Palestinian refugee camp, Netanyahu's victory has raised fears about the future.
Hassan Abdel-Hafez doesn't know exactly how old he is, but estimates around 80.
He had seen decades of strife, he said, but feared for the future.
"The coming period will be one of the hardest for the Palestinian people."
Italy is marking 500 years since the death of Renaissance master Raphael with a blockbuster exhibition whose preparations were marred by a row over a treasured portrait some feared was too fragile to move.
The show at Rome's imposing Scuderie del Quirinale presidential palace includes 200 works by the prolific painter, designer and architect, a child prodigy who died aged only 37 in 1520.
Experts are deeply divided over a portrait of Pope Leo X with two cardinals belonging to the Uffizi Gallery of Florence, the Renaissance capital which lent a quarter of the works going on display in Rome from Thursday through June 2.
Painted in burgundy reds and blood orange between 1518 and 1519, the stunning work caused a sensation at the time for its revolutionary group portraiture concept.
The Uffizi's scientific committee decided that the 154 by 119 centimetre (61 by 47 inch) painting was too fragile to make the trip to Rome.
All four members of the committee resigned last week over a decision by the gallery's German director Eike Schmidt to override their ruling and add the painting to the Rome show.
In a letter published in the daily La Repubblica, the committee noted that the portrait was on a list of 24 "immovable" works the Uffizi had drawn up in December.
The quarrel followed three years of gruelling work aimed at putting together a retrospective befitting a master who was part of a trinity of Renaissance greats along with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
The show will feature works from a hit parade of world-class museums: the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Prado in Madrid and Washington's National Gallery.
Some of its most famous paintings include the Madonna of the Rose, painted in Raphael’s trademark pastel colours; the striking green and red Portrait of Pope Julius II; and the Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, a pyramidal composition in elegant earth tones.
- Red rose -
Raphael was sent off with high honours at a grand funeral at the Vatican, and his remains rest in the Rome Pantheon. A red rose graces his grave year-round.
In addition to the Rome exhibit, the anniversary is also being marked with shows in Urbino, the walled city in central Italy where the master was born, and Milan.
His famous tapestries woven in Bruges and depicting events from the lives of saints Peter and Paul have been hung in the Sistine Chapel, their intended home from the start.
Despite his premature death, Raphael produced a vast amount of seminal work, much of it at the Vatican, whose museums include several rooms filled with his frescoes.
They are mesmerising but unfinished, just hinting at his true genius.
Completed by Raphael's students after his death and depicting the great philosophers in Athens -- including a cheeky cameo of himself -- they remain some of the Vatican's most popular rooms.
Raphael left behind a "heritage of invaluable beauty", Pope Francis said in January.
"As the artist's genius knows how to harmoniously compose the materials, colours and sounds to be a part of a single work of art, so diplomacy calls on the state to build a world of justice and peace, which is the most beautiful picture we can admire," the Argentine-born pontiff said.
The retrospective, proclaimed by the Uffizi director as the largest and most important ever dedicated to Raphael, is already breaking records.
Devotees from around the world have pre-ordered 70,000 tickets, despite Italy bearing the brunt of the new coronavirus scare in Europe.
The Italian government is now mulling a series of new crowd control measures to stem the spread of the COVID-19 disease, which has killed 79 people in Italy in two weeks.
The rise of coronavirus has led to fear worldwide. But it has also led to flareups of racism, as people's terror of getting sick transmutes into a distrust of Chinese people and of Asians generally.
The virus originated in Wuhan, China, meaning that most of the original cases were among Chinese people. But in the wider world at large, Asian immigrants or people of Asian descent are not especially more likely to be carrying the disease than anyone else. That hasn't stopped people around the world for assuming they are, though — and in some cases, violently assaulting them over it.
A Singaporean student at University College London, Jonathan Mok, was accosted by a man who shouted "I don't want your coronavirus in my country," before punching him in the face, bruising his eye, and fracturing his face so badly that he may need reconstructive surgery.
In Amsterdam, two men on a scooter targeted Korean interpreter Jiye Seong-Yu as she rode past on a bike, shouting "Chinese!" and trying to punch her.
Meanwhile, last month in New York City, an Asian woman was assaulted on the subway for wearing a mask:
In many people, global crises bring out leadership and teamwork. Unfortunately, in others, they bring out an uglier side.
Will Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu use his apparent election win to beat back criminal charges, or could the indictments block him from forming a government?
Or maybe the veteran right-wing leader will assemble a coalition and then let the judicial process play out?
The possible consequences of bribery, fraud and breach of trust charges filed against the prime minister last month are hard to predict, but one thing is clear: Israel is facing an unprecedented legal quandary.
According to the latest tally from Monday's vote, Israel's third in less than a year, the pro-Netanyahu faction will control 58 seats in the Knesset, or parliament -- three short of a majority.
The anti-Netanyahu camp, led by the centrist Blue and White party, is expected to hold 53 or 54 seats, with final certified results due next week.
That makes it most likely that President Reuven Rivlin will ask Netanyahu, rather than Blue and White leader Benny Gantz, to form the next government.
But according Amir Fuchs, a legal expert at the Israeli Democracy Institute think-tank, Rivlin will seek legal guidance before tapping Netanyahu.
Netanyahu has been charged with a range of offences including receiving improper gifts and offering a media mogul lucrative regulatory changes in exchange for favourable coverage.
- Still just a 'candidate' -
Israeli law does not prevent a prime minister from serving while under criminal indictment, but Netanyahu is not currently a normal prime minister, Fuchs explained.
Netanyahu is heading a transitional government and, in the days after the election, remains technically just a "candidate for prime minister," Fuchs said.
"The law doesn't deal with a candidate who has a bribery offence against him getting a mandate," he told AFP.
Fuchs predicted that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit -- who charged Netanyahu -- would not give a definitive answer on whether an indicted candidate can form a government.
"I think it is more likely the attorney general will say something pretty vague," Fuchs said.
If that happens, "the supreme court will have to decide," he added.
The Movement for Quality Government in Israel, a civil society group, said Tuesday that it had filed a supreme court petition to bar Netanyahu from forming a government.
"A man like this cannot serve as a leader and role model, and cannot be prime minister," the group said in a statement.
The top court however rejected that petition, holding that it could not rule on it until Netanyahu is reappointed prime minister.
Other organisations were expected to file similar bids against Netanyahu.
- Checks and balances -
Meanwhile, the head of Israel's centre-left Meretz party said Wednesday that the new parliament would have a 62-seat majority to pass a law blocking an indicted person from serving as prime minister.
The tweet from Nitzan Horowitz said such a law would be "politically right... and morally appropriate".
Fuchs agreed that such a law would be fair in principle, but said it would be wrong if passed in a "clearly personal" context targeting Netanyahu.
"It would be legal, but I think it would be very inappropriate," he said.
Netanyahu's opponents have repeatedly warned, including throughout the campaign, that the premier would seek to quash the investigation against him by pushing through new measures that undermine judicial independence or that would grant him retroactive immunity.
Yonatan Freeman, a political scientist and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said such concerns were overstated and evidently did not worry voters, as Likud's election performance was its best ever under with Netanyahu as leader.
Freeman saw "no scenario" where the new parliament agrees to give Netanyahu retroactive immunity and noted that the prime minister had indicated "he plans on showing up for court or having the legal process play out".
Teenage eco-warrior Greta Thunberg branded the EU's grand plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 inadequate on Wednesday and said Europe is falsely claiming to lead the world on climate.
The European Union must stop "pretending that you can be a climate leader and still go on building and subsidising new fossil fuel infrastructure," the Swedish activist told a committee hearing at the European Parliament.
Thunberg was addressing MEPs as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a new draft law that Brussels has hailed as the cornerstone of Europe's "Green Deal" to fight climate change.
The 17-year-old said that despite "disregarding" science, the EU was hoping its plan "will somehow solve the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced".
"This must come to an end," she said.
Earlier, Thunberg had been a guest at a meeting of top EU officials that approved a proposal to enshrine into law the EU's ambition of net zero carbon emissions by mid-century.
This would bind the EU's 27 member states to balance polluting emissions and the removal of greenhouse gases -- such as by using carbon capture technology or reforestation -- within the next 30 years.
The law, once ratified, would also give the EU executive new powers to impose emission targets on member state governments.
"When your house is on fire, you don't wait a few more years to start putting it out," said Thunberg.
"When the EU presents this climate law and net zero by 2050 you indirectly admit surrender, that you are giving up," she said.
AFP / John SAEKI 
JIJI PRESS/AFP / STR 
AFP / Miguel MEDINA 
AFP / NOEL CELIS 
AFP / Justin TALLIS 
