Many old Albanian Orthodox churches and the art they contain lie in ruins due to decades of neglect but they could attract tourists if they are repaired, according to experts.

The government and the Orthodox church itself have started restoring some of the structures that date from the Byzantine period or later in the south of the country.

The churches are often in picturesque locations and their fortunes reflect the twists of Albanian politics over the last century.

Albania became a functioning state after World War One after domination under the Ottoman Empire. It became communist after World War Two but embraced democracy in 1990 and aspires to join the European Union.

The post-Byzantine Saint Athanasius church in Leshnica is one example. Its frescoes have stared at the stars since last May when the roof caved in and its southern wall fell down.

The church has plastic sheets over its walls for protection while debris with parts of frescoes is piled to one side.

Jorgo Sheka said it was taken care as a cultural shrine under late dictator Enver Hoxha, who was a hardline Stalinist, but has been neglected since then.

“No one else lifted a finger but Hoxha cared for it,” he said, criticizing the leaders who followed Hoxha for neglect.

Hoxha banned religion in the 1960s and destroyed many churches and mosques but he kept some for their art. More than 60 percent of Albanians are nominally Muslim and the rest are Christians.

The Leshnica church is decorated with figures of saints in golden halos and biblical scenes in dark blue and red. Saint Athanasius dates to 1797 but frescoes underneath suggested it was older.

Its fame and location in a village helped the Church at Labova of the Cross get a facelift. Its cross of solid gold weighing 0.8 kilos and carved wood from the cross Christ died on was a gift of Emperor Justinian I, two scholars said.

The cross went missing in 1989 and has not been found.
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U.N. refugee agency special envoy Angelina Jolie called on NATO on Wednesday to help stop the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, as the Hollywood star broadened her international efforts to protect women’s rights.

Jolie, who earlier this week visited a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, made her appeal to the U.S.-led alliance’s top decision-making body, the North Atlantic Council, in Brussels, and later met NATO military commanders.

“Violence against women and children, particularly sexual violence, is an increasing feature of conflict,” Jolie told a news conference at NATO headquarters alongside the alliance’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

“This is rape used as a weapon to achieve military or political goals. It affects men and boys as well as women and girls,” Jolie said.

NATO, which counts 29 members and has missions from Kosovo to Afghanistan, has agreed to help report on sexual violence in war to help bring perpetrators to justice and challenge the idea that rape is an unavoidable aspect of conflict.

Jolie, a mother of six who last year released her film “First They Killed My Father” about Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s, said she had met victims of sexual violence in conflict and was trying to be a voice for them.

Expressing frustration at the lack of assistance available to victims, Jolie said she hoped that NATO could help by raising standards in other militaries through its training programs abroad, as well as promoting the role of women in the military.

Jolie singled out the plight of Rohingya refugees fleeing violence in Myanmar and what she said was the inadequate response of many governments around the world.

“I’m very concerned about the Rohingya, I’m very angry at the response … I’m very concerned about the stories of the 10-year old girls being raped,” she said.

“We should all hang our head on how little we have been able to do,” she added.

With some 65 million people forced from their homes by conflict as of the end of 2016, Jolie said the sheer scale of the refugee crisis worldwide felt overwhelming.
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Climate change will be on the agenda for this year’s Group of Seven summit in Quebec despite Canada’s difference of opinion with the Trump administration.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s personal representative for the summit said in an interview Wednesday that implementation of the Paris climate accord will be discussed even though U.S. President Donald Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the agreement. Peter Boehm said if countries agreed on everything, there wouldn’t be a reason to meet.

 

The June gathering of leaders from seven wealthy democracies will mark Trump’s first trip to Canada.

 

Gender equality and women’s empowerment will also be major themes.

 

Boehm is hosting a meeting with the representatives of each country in Waterloo, Ontario, and says Trump’s representative is happy with Canada’s focus.

 

 
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Russia’s foreign spy chief, who is under U.S. sanctions, met last week outside Washington with U.S. intelligence officials, two U.S. sources said, confirming a disclosure that intensified political infighting over probes into Moscow’s alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

Sergey Naryshkin, head of the Russian service known by its acronym SVR, held talks with U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and other U.S. intelligence officials, the sources said. The sources did not reveal the topics discussed.

A Russian Embassy tweet disclosed Naryshkin’s visit. It cited a state-run ITAR-Tass news report that quoted Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, as telling Rossiya-1 television that Naryshkin and his U.S. counterparts discussed the “joint struggle against terrorism.”

Antonov did not identify the U.S. intelligence officials with whom he met.

The Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment. Coats’ office said that while it does not discuss U.S. intelligence officials’ schedules, “any interaction with foreign intelligence agencies would have been conducted in accordance with U.S. law and in consultation with appropriate departments and agencies.”

News of Naryshkin’s secret visit poured fresh fuel on the battles pitting the Trump administration and its Republican defenders against Democrats over investigations into Moscow’s alleged 2016 election interference.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded that the administration “immediately come clean and answer questions — which U.S. officials did he meet with? Did any White House or National Security Council official meet with Naryshkin? What did they discuss?”

The key question, Schumer told reporters, is whether Naryshkin’s visit accounted for the administration’s decision on Monday not to slap new sanctions on Russia under a law passed last year to punish Moscow’s purported election meddling.

“Russia hacked our elections,” Schumer said. “We sanctioned the head of their foreign intelligence and then the Trump administration invites him to waltz through our front door.”

A January 2017 U.S. intelligence report concluded that Russia conducted an influence campaign of hacking and other measures aimed at swinging the 2016 presidential vote to Trump over his Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton.

Last week, the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant reported that the Netherlands intelligence concluded that some of the Russians running a hacking operation, known as “Cozy Bear,” against Democratic organizations were SVR agents.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo told the BBC in an interview last weekend that he had not “seen a significant decrease” in Russian attempts at subversion in Europe and the United States, and he expects Moscow to meddle in November’s U.S. mid-term elections.

Congressional panels and Special Counsel Robert Mueller are investigating Russia’s alleged interference and possible collusion between Moscow and Trump’s election campaign. Russia denies it meddled and Trump dismissed the allegations of collusion as a political witch hunt.

Naryshkin’s visit coincided with other serious disputes in U.S.-Russian relations. They include Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and its interference in Ukraine and Russia’s military intervention on the government’s side in the Syrian civil war.

Washington and Moscow cooperate in some areas, including the fight against Islamic militant groups, officials said.

For example, a month ago the United States provided advance warning to Russia that allowed it to thwart a terrorist plot in St. Petersburg, the White House said.

Naryshkin, who was appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin to head the SVR in September 2016, was sanctioned by the Obama administration in March 2014 as part of the U.S. response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. At the time, he was speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament.

He was banned from entering the United States, but sanctions experts said there are processes for providing people under sanction permission to enter for official business. Meetings between foreign intelligence chiefs, even from rival nations, mostly are kept secret but are not unusual.
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Russian officials from President Vladimir Putin on down have denounced the United States’ publication of the so-called “Putin list” – a U.S. Treasury-issued registry of 210 Russians identified as close to the Russian leader – under a new sanctions law tied to allegations of Kremlin interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

Speaking in Moscow, Putin said that by including nearly all key members of his government and Russian industry on the list, the U.S. had, in effect, carried out “a hostile step” against “all 146 million Russians.”

Yet Putin indicated that Russia would not respond – for now. “We’re not prepared to crawl into the wolf’s trap and make the situation worse,” he said. “We want and will patiently build relations as much as the American side is willing.”

White House reluctance

The list, part of the wider “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act,” or CAATSA, ordered by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump last August, requires the White House to provide a detailed report on the dealings of key Kremlin insiders.

The Trump administration, which has bristled at suggestions it benefited from Russian interference in the elections, held off on complying with the law until the last minute.

The White House’s lukewarm support for the measure was encapsulated by the list’s unveiling: While the Treasury Department noted that the majority of Russians included were not subject to sanctions, the registry’s very existence was seen by congressional leaders as a veiled threat of possible future U.S. reprisals.

Russian leaders unmoved

In Moscow, Russia’s elite maintained that the scare tactic wasn’t working. Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the Russian Duma, the lower house of parliament, said the list was the latest in a failed U.S. sanctions policy aimed at weakening an increasingly powerful Russia.

“The sanctions haven’t led to a change in our country’s political course, or weakened our sovereignty, or led to an internal split,” Volodin said in a statement posted to the Duma’s official website. “New sanctions against Russia will lead to even greater consolidation of society,” he added.

Others merely lauded their inclusion as a point of pride.Vladimir Medinsky, minister of culture, argued he’d been inspired by his “nomination.” Georgi Poltavchenko, governor of St. Petersburg, called it a sign of his hard work. Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said “it would be strange” if the mayor of the capital hadn’t earned his place on the list.

Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Federation Council’s Foreign Affairs Committee, mocked what he saw as amateur detective work by U.S. intelligence agencies. Writing on Facebook, Kosachev said he had the “firm impression that U.S. secret services, desperate to find the provable kompromat they promised on Russian politicians, just copied the Kremlin phonebook.”

The U.S. Treasury’s list of Russian oligarchs appeared to duplicate a Forbes Russia ranking of the country’s 96 wealthiest men. Its registry of government figures, journalists noted, was a near replica of the Kremlin’s English language “key officials” webpage.

Even some Kremlin critics admitted that the sanctions were unlikely to unnerve Russia’s powerful – at least not yet.

“It’s a threat, not a punch,” Dmitry Gudkov wrote on his Facebook page.”For now, that list only means a morning heart attack for the most sensitive of souls.”

Election interference cuts both ways

In advance of the list’s publication, the Kremlin had indicated Russia viewed the registry – and any additional sanctions – as an attempt by the U.S. to influence Russia’s presidential elections in March, when Putin is all but guaranteed re-election to a fourth term.

Putin was asked about the issue during a campaign meeting with supporters, one of whom asked what he would have to do to join the list, to audience laughter.

Putin responded by suggesting the goal of Russians should be to develop their economy to the point where “there’s no point to formulating any lists, to hold us back.”

Public debate

Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who has been barred from competing in the presidential elections, was among those cheering the “Putin list” as a positive development. He noted that his Anti-Corruption Foundation team had carried out its own investigations and produced reports that highlighted Kremlin corruption by several of the listed figures.

“Well, what I can say?” Navalny tweeted. “We’re glad that they’ve been officially recognized as thieves and swindlers on the international level.”

Meanwhile, online debate seemed to be split over the blanket nature of the Treasury list and whether it had gone too far or not far enough.

Why, some asked, hadn’t the Kremlin central bankers been included? Where were Russia’s senior court judges and the head of the election commission?

Others questioned why Russia’s human rights ombudsman was on the list,or a businessman who, although wealthy, had no clear ties to the Kremlin.

And if Russia’s top diplomat,Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, was on the list, who was left to negotiate with Washington if and when relations are repaired?

Konstantin von Eggert, a foreign affairs analyst and host of the independent TV-Rain channel, noted that the list had suddenly rendered the roles of competing interest groups inside and outside the Kremlin irrelevant.

The U.S. had included nearly all of Russia’s entire political and economic elite in a web of Russia sanctions that touch on varied issues such as election interference, human rights abuses and the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine.

“Everyone,” argued von Eggert, “is now in the same boat.”
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Along dimmed corridors in an elegant villa in central Belgrade, visitors are treated to a flashy presentation of Nikola Tesla’s technology — as well as a huge array of the visionary scientist’s clothes, hundreds of instruments, and even his ashes.

The Serbian museum, dedicated to everything to do with the 19th-century inventor and electricity pioneer, remained in relative obscurity for decades under former Yugoslavia. But thanks to a global revival of interest in the scientist, the collection is now drawing big crowds from home and abroad.

Museum staff say some 130,000 people visited last year, compared to about 30,000 a year in the past. The small museum is now ranked among the top must-see destination for tourists.
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The United States is expressing its “highest level of concern” after a Russian military jet came dangerously close to a U.S. plane in international airspace over the Black Sea Monday.

The encounter came during a Russian military exercise.

“While the U.S. aircraft was operating under international law, the Russian side was flagrantly violating existing agreements and international law,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement late Monday.

“This is but the latest example of Russian military activities disregarding international norms and agreements.”

According to U.S. Naval Forces Europe, a Russian SU-27 came within one-and-a-half meters of crossing directly in front of the flight path of an American EP-3.

There has been no response so far from Russia.

The State Department calls on Russia to stop what it calls unsafe actions that increase the risk of miscalculation and midair collisions. 
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