Germany has deported an accomplice of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States to his home country of Morocco.

 

Mounir al-Motassadeq had spent almost 15 years in prison in Germany before he was deported Monday to Morocco.

 

German media published photographs of Motassadeq wearing a blindfold and being led by two armed policemen to a helicopter. German officials confirmed he was flown out by plane from Frankfurt airport on Monday evening.

 

Motassadeq was convicted of helping Mohamed Atta, the alleged pilot of one of the hijacked 9/11 planes, and other suicide pilots to help plot the attacks on New York and Washington. The suicide pilots were part of an al-Qaida cell based in Hamburg, Germany, where Motassadeq also lived.

 

Motassadeq was found guilty in 2003 of being a member of a terrorist organization and an accessory to the murder of the passengers aboard the four airliners used in the September 11 attacks. His five years of trials in Germany involved multiple appeals, overturned convictions, and reinstated verdicts. In the end, he received the maximum sentence the German court could hand down for the crimes — 15 years in prison.

 

Motassadeq denied being involved in the 9/11 plot, but admitted to being friends with those who did. He said his actions to send money to the suicide pilots were merely favors for his friends.

 

He was the first person convicted anywhere in the world in connection with the September 11 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people died.

 

Motassadeq was released shortly before completing his 15-year sentence on the condition that he agreed to be deported to Morocco. Germany says it will re-arrest him if he ever returns.
…

One of the first steps taken by Spain’s prime minister after assuming office in June was to order the exhumation of the remains of right-wing military dictator Francisco Franco from a mausoleum in the capital’s outskirts, where they have rested since he died in power a half century ago.

 

“Democracy cannot dignify a dictator,” Pedro Sanchez, leader of the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), said in justifying the order.

The decision was hailed by leftists, but critics warned that polarizing struggles between traditional conservatives and a new breed of left-wing populists could end five decades of bipartisan continuity since Franco’s death.

 

Sanchez maintains a razor-thin edge in parliament’s lower chamber through an alliance with hard-left groups and Catalan nationalists. His priorities, he said in an address to last month’s U.N. General Assembly, include raising social spending, fighting climate change and promoting women’s rights.

Elsewhere in Europe, populism has come to be identified with far-right movements whose rhetoric is often associated with the xenophobia and racism that characterized the fascist movements that brought Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to power.

 

But today’s Spanish populism, says influential opinion columnist Mario Saavedra, is “leftist” and appears rooted in memories of a 1930’s republic that was overthrown by Franco in a bloody civil war.

The republic established after King Alfonso XIII stepped aside in 1931 captured the imagination of European and American intellectuals such as Ernest Hemingway, who based his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls on his experiences there. It brought together the world’s most fashionable utopian ideologies at the time, including communism and anarchist syndicalism. Democratic socialists occupied its presidency.

 

Historian Javier Arjona draws parallels between the coalition of leftist parties which maneuvered Sanchez into the prime minister’s seat and the radical “Popular Front” that came to power through a disputed election victory in 1936. Government supporters scoff at the comparison and Sanchez accuses conservatives of appealing to the “extreme right” in a bid to regain power.

 

Regardless, a leftist brand of republicanism seems to be back in vogue. Its purple colors appear at social protests and adorn the jerseys of some soccer clubs. Catalan nationalists and the far-left United We Can party who prop up Sanchez’s government call for restoring a republic and holding a referendum on the future of the monarchy. Burning pictures of King Felipe has become a ritual at separatist rallies in Catalonia.

 

United We Can, or Unidos Podemos (UP) in Spanish, is led by Pablo Iglesias, a political science professor who merged a new generation of leftists with remnants of the old communist party. His movement harnessed a wave of social discontent that exploded into mass protests during the recent global recession, in which Spain’s unemployment rate topped 25 percent nationally and reached 50 percent among young people.

 

Disenchanted working-class supporters of Sanchez’s mainstream PSOE turned to UP, which promised to confront corruption on all sides.  

 

While Spain has largely recovered from the darkest days of the crash, UP continues to win followers by denouncing abusive business practices such as the eviction of low-income tenants from housing estates when they are bought up by foreign “vulture funds.” It also champions an increase in old-age pensions for Spain’s growing senior population.

 

In unveiling its budget October 11, the Sanchez government announced an agreement between the PSOE and UP on a package that includes a massive increase in public spending, the expansion of public services, new regulations, and a substantial rise in the minimum wage.

 

Sanchez has also called for changing Spain’s constitution. His justice minister, Dolores Delgado, an outspoken proponent of women’s rights, has said that it needs to be rewritten to make it more gender neutral.

 

His vice president, Carmen Calvo, has called for curbing press freedoms to counter what she calls a “high volume of half-truths and lies” by conservative media. She has threatened to take legal action against the conservative, pro-monarchy, pro-Catholic newspaper ABC over its published allegations that Sanchez plagiarized his doctoral thesis.  

 

Some business leaders say they are worried. John de Zulueta, chairman of the Circulo de Empresarios, the Spanish business association, said tax hikes proposed by Sanchez to cover a rise in social spending could depress the markets at a time when the economy is not fully out of recession. The IMF has also criticized Sanchez’s plans to finance deficit spending.

 

Government spokespersons defend their actions, saying their plan is adjusted to EU budget requirements.

 

Conservatives are also trying to block Sanchez from satisfying Catalan separatists by granting pardons to Catalan Vice president Oriol Junqueras and other officials who are in prison awaiting trial for plotting an independence bid.

“We have to find a political rather than a judicial solution to the Catalan crisis,” Sanchez said after recent violent protests in Barcelona.

 

Political analyst Ramon Peralta, a professor at Complutense University of Madrid, said Sanchez “tries to shield his government by wrapping it in popular causes.”

 

In his U.N. speech, Sanchez highlighted his feminist agenda, boasting that 60 percent of his cabinet are women and pledging “zero tolerance” of sexual harassment.

 

Feminist leaders, who see Spain’s traditional culture of machismo as toxic to women’s rights, are strongly backing Sanchez despite a scandal in which the justice minister was caught on tape speaking insultingly about the interior minister’s homosexuality.

 

Sanchez’ moves have been well received by liberals elsewhere in Europe. In a recent editorial, the British newspaper The Guardian said, “exhuming Franco is a necessary step in the final stages of Spain’s historic journey away from authoritarian violence towards enduring democracy.”

 

But others, including some of the prime minister’s allies, suggest that steps like the exhumation of Franco will simply fan the flames of the extreme right. Since Sanchez announced plans to open Franco’s crypt, visits to the mountaintop mausoleum have risen by 77 percent.

 

The visitors have included blue-shirted members of the Falange party, who raise their arms in the fascist salute while singing their battle hymn, “Cara al Sol,” or “Face to the Sun.” A new extreme-right party called VOX has threatened to stage mass protests to block the exhumation.

 

Spanish public opinion is about evenly split. According to a survey in July by polling institute Sigma Dos, about 41 percent support the decision while 39 percent are opposed. 
…

The Lehman Brothers bankruptcy threw the United States into an epoch-defining financial storm. Imagine 300 of them going bust at once.

That, in relative terms, is what Iceland endured a decade ago during its banking crisis, which on this rugged island steeped in myths of gods and giants is now known as “hrunid” – the collapse.

The last in a series of prosecutions of those deemed responsible started this month and the hope is that it will give this country of 330,000 people some closure after years of reckoning and reconstruction. Icelanders have become more cynical about political and business leaders, to the point of drafting a new constitution. The top financial entrepreneurs of a generation have been thrown behind bars and the economy has had to be reinvented more profoundly than most countries affected by the crisis.

“Icelanders experienced the crash as a deep betrayal, not just as a serious economic loss,” says Jon Olafsson, a professor who advises the prime minister on ways to improve trust in the government. “Politicians, businessmen and the media told the public, over and over, that everything was fine and people believed them.”

Everything was not fine. Over the span of one week, 90 percent of the financial sector defaulted.

The collapse of Iceland’s three major commercial banks – which had grown 20-fold over the previous seven years through debt-fueled acquisitions abroad – amounted to the third-largest bankruptcy in modern financial history, according to the Icelandic financial regulator. For the United States, an economy 1,100 times bigger, it would be like if 300 Lehman Brothers defaulted simultaneously, it notes.

An economic depression followed that saw people line up for food aid, an unprecedented sight in this country with a progressive welfare state. Families stockpiled goods from supermarket shelves and thousands emigrated.

Johanna Thorvaldsdottir, a goat farmer, had a mortgage in a foreign currency – a common practice then because of the strength of the local currency and lower interest rates abroad – when the Icelandic krona lost nearly half of its value overnight. The cost of her debt soared.

“I worked every evening, sometimes until midnight,” she says. Had it not been for a crowdfunding campaign, raising $90,000 from donors worldwide, the family estate would have been seized by bank creditors.

“We were lucky,” she says. “Many people were not.”

As big as the shock of the financial crisis was, so was the country’s determination to put things right. It emerged from recession in 2011 as it refocused the economy on tourism and technology, and it has been more aggressive than most countries in going after the culprits of the crisis.

Altogether, 29 men and two women have been sentenced to a combined 99 years of prison, for crimes ranging from insider trading to market manipulation. Six cases are still in the appeals process. By comparison, no top Wall Street executives have been prosecuted in the U.S.

Last week, Hreidar Mar Sigurdsson, the former CEO of Kaupthing Bank, stood trial in the last criminal prosecution related to the financial crisis.

The 48-year old has been sentenced in four prior cases, to a total of seven years in prison. He now stands accused of rigging share prices in his bank two months before it crashed. He denies wrongdoing. While a guilty sentence is unlikely to send him back to prison, as he has already served the maximum time for such crimes, it would help draw a line under the cases, which have dragged on for years.

Sigurdsson began his career at a fish factory in a small town before entering finance, and was during the booming years hailed as a self-made genius.

In some ways, his story reflects that of the country, which in the 1990s embraced the flashy world of finance to attain the wealth that the traditional industries could not provide. The media frequently referred to aggressive entrepreneurs like Sigurdsson as modern-day Vikings raiding foreign shores for acquisitions. In the end, it led to disaster.

Iceland is bent on “learning every lesson from the crisis,” says Iosif Kovras, director of Accountability after Economic Crisis, a research project based in City University-London.

He contrasted Iceland’s approach with that of Ireland, where the crisis was also traumatic but took longer to unfold. The country received a bailout from fellow European nations that took years of reforms to complete.

“It did not prompt the same political urgency,” says Kovras. “Iceland’s apocalyptic crash cleared the way for gathering evidence and data.”

The University of Iceland this month marked the 10-year anniversary of the crash with a symposium hosting over 100 speakers. They ruminated on topics like the crisis’ impact on cardiovascular health, pop-song lyrics, patriarchy and popular protests.

“There is no formula for restoring a peaceful, democratic society,” former President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson said in an evening-long public broadcast reflecting on the events. “Amid the crisis, when the situation was revolution-like, I feared not for the economy but our recovery as a nation.”

Reforms of the financial sector have focused on making it less risky. Already there are those saying the rules should be relaxed to allow for faster growth, as the U.S. did this year. President Donald Trump’s administration eased a 2010 law that had sought to limit risk in the financial sector and protect taxpayers from bailing out banks. Critics including Trump saw it as red tape holding the economy back.

Others suggest that loosening the rules would merely increase the likelihood of a new crisis and that Icelanders already seem to be forgetting the lessons of the crash.

Thorhallur Thorhallsson, who works as a tour guide in the capital, notes the proliferation of building cranes rising from the skyline.

“We are so used to cranes occupying the sky that it was decided to make them our national bird,” he tells a half dozen tourists gathered by the statue of the Norse explorer who is said to have settled the island 1,100 years ago.

“In fact, today, Reykjavik has more building cranes than before the 2008 crash.”
…

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative allies lost their absolute majority in Bavaria’s state parliament by a wide margin Sunday, according to projections from a regional election that could cause more turbulence in the national government.

The Christian Social Union was on course to take just over 35 percent of the vote, down from 47.7 percent five years ago, projections for ARD and ZDF public television based on exit polls and a partial vote count indicated.

That would be the socially conservative party’s worst performance in Bavaria, which it has traditionally dominated, since 1950. Squabbling in Merkel’s national government and a power struggle at home have weighed in recent months on the CSU, which has taken a hard line on migration tradition.

There were gains for parties to its left and right. The Greens were expected to win up to 19 percent to secure second place, more than double their support in 2013. And the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, was set to enter the state legislature with around 11 percent of the vote.

The center-left Social Democrats, Merkel’s other coalition partner in Berlin, were on course for a disastrous result of 10 percent or less, half of what the party received in 2013 and its worst in the state since World War II.

The CSU has held an absolute majority in the Bavarian parliament for all but five of the past 56 years and governed the prosperous southeastern state for 61 years.

Needing coalition partners to govern would in itself be a major setback for the party, which only exists in Bavaria and has long leveraged its strength there to punch above its weight in national politics.

“Of course this isn’t an easy day for the CSU,” the state’s governor, Markus Soeder, told supporters in Munich, adding that the party accepted the “painful” result “with humility.”

Soeder pointed to goings-on in Berlin and said “it’s not so easy to uncouple yourself from the national trend completely.”

But he stressed that the CSU still emerged Sunday as the state’s strongest party and a mandate to form the next Bavarian government.

He said his preference was for a center-right coalition — which would see the CSU partner with the Free Voters, a local center-right party that was seen winning 11.5 percent, and possibly also the Free Democrats, who may or may not secure the 5 percent needed to win state parliament seats.

The Greens, traditionally bitter opponents, with a more liberal approach to migration and an emphasis on environmental issues, are another possibility.

Bavaria is home to some 13 million of Germany’s 82 million people.

In Berlin, the CSU is one of three parties in Merkel’s federal coalition government along with its conservative sister, Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, and the Social Democrats.

That government has been notable largely for internal squabbling since it took office in March. The CSU leader, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, has often played a starring role.

Back in Bavaria, a long-running CSU power struggle saw the 69-year-old Seehofer give up his job as state governor earlier this year to Soeder, a younger and sometimes bitter rival.

Seehofer has sparred with Merkel about migration on and off since 2015, when he assailed her decision to leave Germany’s borders open as refugees and others crossed the Balkans.

They argued in June over whether to turn back small numbers of asylum-seekers at the German-Austrian border, briefly threatening to bring down the national government.

Seehofer also starred in a coalition crisis last month over Germany’s domestic intelligence chief, who was accused of downplaying recent far-right violence against migrants.

Seehofer, who has faced widespread speculation lately that a poor Bavarian result would cost him his job, said he was “saddened” by Sunday’s outcome, but didn’t address his own future.

It remains to be seen whether and how the Bavarian result will affect the national government’s stability or Merkel’s long-term future.

Any aftershocks may be delayed, because another state election is coming Oct. 28 in neighboring Hesse, where conservative Volker Bouffier is defending the 19-year hold of Merkel’s CDU on the governor’s office. Bouffier has criticized the CSU for diminishing people’s trust in Germany’s conservatives.

“Clearly the choices of subjects and the debates of recent weeks led to our friends in the CSU being unable to put their successful regional record at the center of their election campaign,” said the CDU’s general secretary, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.

 
…

Britain’s former Brexit secretary is urging members of Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet to rebel against her proposed deal with the European Union over the terms of Britain’s departure from the bloc.

David Davis wrote in the Sunday Times that May’s plans for some continued ties with the EU under her Chequers plan is “completely unacceptable” and must be stopped. The fellow Conservative Party member said the time has come for ministers to shoot down May’s plan.

“It is time for the cabinet to exert their collective authority,” he said. “This week the authority of our constitution is on the line.”

May is struggling to build a consensus behind her Brexit plans ahead of a cabinet meeting Tuesday that will be followed by an EU summit Wednesday in Brussels.

If Davis’ call for a rebellion is effective, the cabinet meeting Tuesday would be a likely place for opposition to surface.

Davis and former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson resigned from the cabinet this summer to protest May’s Brexit blueprint. Both have become vocal opponents of her plan, calling it a betrayal of the Brexit vote that would leave Britain in a weakened position.

May also faces obstacles from the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, which has played a crucial role in propping up her minority government in Parliament.

DUP leader Arlene Foster remains opposed to any Brexit plan that would require checks on goods traveling between Northern Ireland and Britain, as some EU leaders have suggested as part of a “backstop” plan.

The Chequers plan has also been questioned by some opposition Labour Party lawmakers, further complicating the prime minister’s hopes of winning parliamentary backing for any Brexit deal she reaches with EU officials.
…

Saudi Arabia has rebuffed U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to punish it over the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, saying Sunday it would retaliate with “greater” economic actions of its own if Trump were to sanction Riyadh.

The Saudi stock market plunged seven percent before recovering to a five percent loss for the day after Trump told CBS there would be “severe punishment” if it is determined, as Turkey believes, that Saudi agents killed Khashoggi inside Riyadh’s consulate in Istanbul two weeks ago.

The Saudis have said the allegation is “baseless,” but have provided no proof that Khashoggi left the diplomatic outpost alive after arriving to pick up documents for his impending marriage.

The official Saudi Press Agency quoted an unnamed government source as saying, “The Kingdom affirms its total rejection of any threats and attempts to undermine it, whether by threatening to impose economic sanctions, using political pressures, or repeating false accusations.”

The statement said the Saudi government “also affirms that if it receives any action, it will respond with greater action,” noting that its economy, as the world’s biggest oil exporter, “has an influential and vital role in the global economy.”

Trump, in excerpts released Saturday from an interview to be aired Sunday on CBS’s 60 Minutes show, warned there would be “severe punishment” for Saudi Arabia if it is determined that Khashoggi was murdered inside the Saudi consulate. Khashoggi was living in self-imposed exile in the United States and had criticized Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in columns written for The Washington Post.

Trump said “nobody knows yet” what happened inside the consulate, “but we’ll probably be able to find out” if Salman ordered Khashoggi’s murder. Trump added the United States “would be very upset and angry if that were the case.”

But Trump, who has frequently boasted about his business ties with the kingdom, suggested during the interview that ending U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia would not be an option, saying, “I don’t want to hurt jobs.”

A key U.S. lawmaker, Republican Senator Marco Rubio, told CNN on Sunday that if Saudi agents “went medieval” on Khashoggi, “that would be an outrage.”

He said any response to Khashoggi’s killing “needs to be strong, not symbolic,” including the possibility of cutting off U.S. weapons sales to Riyadh, or it would undermine the U.S.’s moral standing in the world.

In protest of Khashoggi’s disappearance, several U.S. businesses leaders have pulled out of next week’s Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, dubbed “Davos in the Desert,” after the annual meeting of world economic interests in Switzerland. Rubio said U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin should also withdraw, but White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said the Treasury chief is still planning to go.

Media reports say Khashoggi may have recorded his own death on his Apple Watch.

Accounts say Khashoggi turned on the sound recording capability on his device as he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2.

The watch is reported to have been connected to the iCloud and the cell phone that he left with his fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, before he entered the consulate. Cengiz said she waited for Khashoggi to come out of the consulate, but he never left.

The reports say the watch recorded not only Khashoggi’s interrogation and torture, but also his murder.

The Washington Post reported in recent days that the Turkish government informed U.S. officials it was in possession of video recordings that prove Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate, but have not made them public.

Saudi officials have denied any involvement in Khashoggi’s disappearance and said he departed the consulate shortly after entering. Saudi Interior Minister Prince Abdel Aziz bin Saud bin Nayef has called the reports the government ordered Khashoggi killed “lies and baseless allegations.”

A group of 15 Saudi men is reported to have flown into Istanbul the day that Khashoggi went to the consulate. Media reports say the men were in the consulate when Khashoggi was there. The men stayed at the consulate for a few hours and then took flights back to Saudi Arabia.

One of the members of the group, according to CNN, has been identified by Turkey’s official Anadolu news agency and the Sabah newspaper as Salah Muhammed al-Tubaiqi, whom the media outlets say is listed on an official Saudi health website as the head of the forensic medicine department at the Interior Ministry.

 
…

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was released from jail Sunday after three weeks behind bars for organizing anti-Kremlin protests, his second spell in detention in as many months.

The 42-year-old activist left a detention center in the south of Moscow early in the morning and spoke briefly to journalists before leaving in a waiting car.

“Over the 50 days I have been in jail we have seen yet more evidence that this regime is in complete decline,” he said, referencing recent embarrassments to Moscow’s intelligence services abroad and the launch failure of a manned Russian space rocket. 

“If anyone thinks that with arrests … they can scare or stop us, that is clearly not the case,” he said after thanking those who supported him.

Authorities have turned up the heat on Vladimir Putin’s main opposition since the Russian president’s approval ratings took a beating over deeply unpopular pension reforms.

The Kremlin critic finished a 30-day sentence in September for organizing a rally at the start of the year, but was arrested as soon as he was released to face further charges over another protest.

The latter demonstration, against the raising of the retirement age, was time to coincide with regional elections last month.

The Kremlin suffered rare defeats in those polls, with voters rejecting candidates from the ruling United Russia party in at least two regions. 
…

Twenty-two people, including children, died on Sunday when a vehicle carrying migrants reportedly heading for EU member Greece plunged off the highway into a waterway in western Turkey.

The vehicle, described as a lorry, was traveling on a highway in the Izmir region close to Izmir airport when it flipped over and fell into the channel several meters below, state-run Anadolu news agency said.

The nationality of the migrants was not made clear. Twenty-two people were killed, the agency said, lifting an earlier toll of 19, while 13 more were injured.

Turkish television pictures showed the stricken wreckage of the vehicle, which was reduced to burned-out metal by the impact of the crash with corpses strewn beside.

The DHA news agency said the driver of the vehicle, a Turkish man aged 35, survived and told police from his hospital bed that he had swerved to avoid an oncoming white vehicle.

The dead included two babies and two children as well as a pregnant woman, it said.

Once the driver’s hospital treatment is completed, he will be sent to court with a demand to be arrested, Anadolu said. Regional prosecutors have opened an investigation, it added.

DHA said that the vehicle was headed for the coast of the Izmir region, from where the migrants planned to take inflatable dinghies, which had been packed into their vehicle, to Greece’s Samos island.

Samos is just a few kilometers north of Turkey’s Dilek peninsula that juts out from the Izmir region.

Key transit point

Turkey is a key transit points for migrants from troubled countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa seeking a new life in Europe.

A million migrants crossed from Turkey into Greece in 2015, mostly by boats, in a crisis which forced a deal between Ankara and the EU to stem the flow of people.

Numbers have fallen since but people are still undertaking what is a highly perilous journey and the flow has ticked up this year from 2017.

According to UN figures, more than 24,500 migrants have arrived in Greece by sea so far this year, with 118 people losing their lives via this route.

Last week, eight migrants were found drowned off the Karaburun district, also in Izmir province, after their boat capsized.

Twenty-six others are still officially listed as missing after that accident, according to Anadolu.

The trips of migrants towards Greece are often organized by smugglers who demand hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars per person to sort out the logistics.

After the disaster off Karaburun, four suspected smugglers were arrested following evidence given by an Iraqi who survived, Anadolu said. They had demanded a fee of $1,500 from each migrant.

 

 

 
…

Pope Francis has created seven new saints in a canonization ceremony at the Vatican.  The new saints included two important Church figures who were strong voices in the favor of the poor: Pope Paul VI and Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. 

Before tens of thousands of faithful in Saint Peter’s Square, Pope Francis elevated to sainthood seven people including Pope Paul VI and murdered Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.  Both were controversial figures in the church.

Large tapestries with the images of the seven new saints hung from St. Peter’s Basilica as is customary during a canonization ceremony.  The other five lesser-known new saints were from Italy, Germany and Spain.  They included an Italian orphan who died from bone cancer when he was just 19 years old.  

Salvadoran President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, Chile’s President Sebastian Pinera and Spain’s Queen Sofia attended the ceremony.

Pope Paul VI was the third pope to be declared saint by Francis since his election in 2013.  He was best known for having presided over the final sessions of the Second Vatican Council, the church meetings in the 1960s that reformed the Catholic Church and opened it to the world.

Francis said Paul VI, like the apostle, spent his life for Christ’s Gospel, crossing new boundaries and becoming its witness in proclamation and in dialogue, a prophet of an extroverted Church looking to those far away and taking care of the poor.

In a sign of the importance Pope Francis placed on Romero and Paul, Francis wore the blood-stained rope belt Romero wore when he was murdered in 1980 and also used Pope Paul’s staff, chalice and vestment.  Both men strongly influenced Francis and he praised them for their courage in turbulent times and their dedication to social justice and the poor.

Romero was killed in San Salvador by a right-wing death squad.  He had often denounced violence, repression and poverty in his homilies.  He became an icon for Latin America’s peasants.   

In his homily, Pope Francis praised Romero for “disregarding his own life to be close to the poor and to his people.”

 
…

A car carrying migrants collided with a truck in northern Greece Saturday, killing 11 people, police said.

Ten of the victims were believed to be migrants who crossed into the Greece from Turkey. The 11th person was the driver and a suspected migrant smuggler, police said. 

Police said the car in which the migrants were packed had another vehicle’s license plates and is suspected of having been used for migrant trafficking. The car had not stopped at a police checkpoint during its journey, but it wasn’t immediately clear how close to the site of the crash that it happened.

Increase in migrants

Police said the crash occurred just after 5 a.m. (0200 GMT) near the town of Kavala. The car, which had been heading to the main northern city of Thessaloniki, collided with a truck heading in the opposite direction and burst into flames. All of the victims have been burned beyond recognition. The truck caught fire as well. 

All those in the car were killed. The truck driver, a 39-year-old Greek man, was treated for minor injuries in a hospital in northern Greece before being discharged.

Greek authorities have been seeing an increase in people illegally crossing the Greek-Turkish border in recent months. Many are transported to Thessaloniki, where they head to police stations to be registered and apply for asylum.

Spanish rescues

Elsewhere, Spain’s maritime rescue service says it recovered the bodies of three migrants and feared that another 17 were missing in the Mediterranean Sea. 

The service says that its rescue craft found the three bodies in waters near a sinking boat it intercepted east of the Strait of Gibraltar. Rescuers saved 36 men of sub-Saharan origin from the boat. The saved migrants said that another 17 men who had traveled with them were missing. 

In total, the service pulled 509 migrants from 15 small boats Friday. 

The United Nations says that 337 of the total of 1,783 migrants who have died trying to reach Europe by sea in 2018 perished in waters near Spain.

 
…

Russia’s top diplomat on Friday called the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s decision to recognize the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s independence from Moscow a Washington-backed “provocation,” from which he vowed to protect “the faithful” in Ukraine if the schism sparks violence.

On Thursday, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, the Istanbul-based head of global Orthodox Christianity, recognized Ukrainian churches as independent from the Russian Orthodox Church, ending the Moscow Patriarchy’s 332-year oversight of Ukrainian parishes.

The move has immediately restored Ecumenical Patriarchate jurisdiction over all Orthodox faithful in Ukraine, granting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church the right to autocephaly — the ecclesiastical term for self-governance. Under this decree, leaders of Ukraine’s Orthodox Christian community will be able to form an independently administrated Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Calling the decision “a provocation by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, undertaken with direct public support from Washington,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described the move as part of a conspiracy in violation of internationally recognized laws.

“Interfering in church life is forbidden by law in Ukraine, in Russia, and, I hope, in any normal state,” he said, according to a transcript of a press conference posted on the Foreign Ministry’s website.

The decision, which has sparked celebration in Kyiv and outrage in Moscow, is a victory in Ukraine’s struggle to keep Moscow at bay since its 2014 annexation of Crimea and its continued support for separatists fighting against Kyiv in the east, where violence has claimed an estimated 10,000 lives.

Theologian Sergei Chapnin recently wrote in Bloomberg News that “there’s a real danger that the rift could lead to bloodshed, an outcome that all sides must act decisively to prevent.”

Although the Kyiv Patriarchy’s formal break from Moscow has been discussed intermittently since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian aggression since 2014 has widened fissures running throughout Eastern Europe’s Slavic Orthodox community, hastening the split being witnessed this week.

“This step by the Kyiv Patriarchy was expected for a long time, and it is in response to many factors,” said Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun, acting director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

“The Ukrainian people are divided. There are millions of Orthodox people who don’t have an alternative to the Moscow Patriarchy … and those people want to belong to an independent church that is free from Russian propaganda, free from collaboration with the Russian regime,” he told VOA, calling the Moscow Patriarchy an ideological instrument of Russian aggression in Ukraine.

“Because the church was intertwined with this aggressive policy of the Russian state, the response to the Russian aggression now includes also response to the ecclesial issue,” he said. “So, the ecclesial issue in Ukraine — the church issue in Ukraine — has become a part of the political and security agenda for the state.”

Even then, he added, the Kyiv Patriarchy’s divorce from Moscow will give the faithful more options in terms of how they choose to practice their faith.

“This move is wise because it corresponds completely to the principle of freedom of consciousness, of freedom of religion,” he said, explaining that all Ukraine-based parishioners will be able to choose which type of Orthodox Church they want to attend — including those guided by tenets of the Russian Orthodox tradition.

“And the [Ukrainian] state really stressed that in the statements by [President Petro Poroshenko] and other political officials, that they will respect that choice of the people and that communities can belong to any jurisdiction they want.”

In September, Patriarch Filaret, head of the Kyiv Patriarchy, told VOA’s Ukrainian Service that the process of unifying Ukraine’s Orthodoxy will guarantee that each parish will be free to determine its future.

“Religious infighting would be a justification for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to interfere in Ukraine’s internal affairs,” he said, vowing to avoid bloodshed at all costs. “We want this process to be free of violence. If they don`t want to join a Ukrainian church, they can stay with the Russian church.”

Kyiv’s formal split from Moscow, he added, means that the Russian Orthodox Church will not only lose most of its political and ideological influence over Ukrainian faithful, but also its standing as one of the leaders of global Orthodoxy.

“Currently, Moscow’s Patriarchy together with the Ukrainian church is the biggest Orthodox church in the world,” he told VOA, adding that Constantinople’s recognition of autocephaly cuts the Moscow Patriarchy to half its current size.

“It wouldn’t be able to fight for leadership in the Orthodox Church,” Filaret said, referring to a centuries-long geopolitical competition between Moscow and Constantinople to claim command of Orthodoxy’s quarter-billion followers worldwide.

Although more than two-thirds of Ukrainians are Orthodox Christians, Russia is home to the largest number of Orthodox faithful, bolstering its national identity as a bastion of traditional Christian values, an image the Kremlin goes out of its way to project globally.

The next step in Ukraine’s split from Russia is to reunite its various strands of Orthodox faith under the new church, which includes deciding the fate of church buildings and monasteries, some of which are aligned to the Russian Orthodox Church.

At the start of 2018, Ukraine was home to roughly one-third of the Russian church’s parish holdings, according to Kyiv’s official data.

Russia’s past efforts to undermine the Kyiv Patriarchy’s move toward self-rule involved a cyberattack on Bartholomew’s top clergy, according to the Associated Press.

Last month, the State Department endorsed support for Ukraine’s Orthodox religious leaders’ pursuit of autocephaly, saying it “maintains unwavering support for Ukraine and its territorial integrity in the face of Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine and the Russian occupation of Crimea.”

This story originated in VOA’s Ukrainian Service. Some information is from AFP and Reuters.
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