Italy’s premier hosted a meeting Tuesday of Libya’s rival leaders on the sidelines of a conference aiming to help its former colony crack down on Islamic militants and human trafficking.

Photos of the encounter show Premier Giuseppe Conte presiding over a handshake between the Tripoli-based U.N.-backed prime minister, Fayez Serraj, and rival Gen. Khalifa Hifter, commander of the self-styled Libyan National Army that is based in Libya’s east.

Other leaders attending the Palermo conference, including French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, also participated. The office of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who backs Hiftar, confirmed he joined the “mini-summit” Tuesday with Conte and other leaders.

 

Italy’s populist government organized the two-day conference in hopes of making progress on ending Libya’s lawlessness and promoting a U.N. framework for eventual elections.

 

But expectations were limited, with Hiftar’s camp making clear that he wasn’t participating in the conference itself but rather meeting with leaders of neighboring countries on the sidelines. Neither Hiftar nor el-Sissi posed for the final conference group photo.

 

A statement on social media Tuesday by a spokesman for Hiftar’s army, Ahmed al-Mesmari, suggested that Hifter was snubbing the meeting because he accuses representatives from the Tripoli side of working with militias he considers illegitimate, as well as Islamic extremists backed by Qatar.

 

However, an Italian diplomatic official, briefing reporters in Palermo, said the atmosphere of the meeting was cordial and collaborative.

 

Libya plunged into chaos after the 2011 uprising that ousted and killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, and it is now governed by rival administrations in the east and west with both relying on the support of militias.

 

It has also become a haven for Islamic militants and armed groups, including several from neighboring countries, which survive on looting and human trafficking, particularly in the remote south of the country.

 

Italy’s anti-migrant government is keen in particular to stem the Libyan-based migrant smuggling networks that have sent hundreds of thousands of would-be refugees to Europe via Italy in recent years.
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German states have drafted a list of demands aimed at tightening a law that requires social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to remove hate speech from their sites, the Handelblatt newspaper reported Monday.

Justice ministers from the states will submit their proposed revisions to the German law called NetzDG at a meeting with Justice Minister Katarina Barley on Thursday, the newspaper said, saying it had obtained a draft of the document.

The law, which came into full force on Jan. 1, is a highly ambitious effort to control what appears on social media and it has drawn a range of criticism.

While the German states are focused on concerns about how complaints are processed, other officials have called for changes following criticism that too much content was being blocked.

The states’ justice ministers are calling for changes that would make it easier for people who want to complain about banned content such as pro-Nazi ideology to find the required forms on social media platforms.

They also want to fine social media companies up to 500,000 euros ($560,950) for providing “meaningless replies” to queries from law enforcement authorities, the newspaper said.

Till Steffen, the top justice official in Hamburg and a member of the Greens party, told the newspaper that the law had in some cases proven to be “a paper tiger.”

“If we want to effectively limit hate and incitement on the internet, we have to give the law more bite and close the loopholes,” he told the paper. “For instance, it cannot be the case that some platforms hide their complaint forms so that no one can find them.”

Facebook in July said it had deleted hundreds of offensive posts since implementation of the law, which foresees fines of up to 50 million euros ($56.10 million) for failure to comply.
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The Greater Paris region will become a low-emission zone from next summer, which will limit the circulation of old diesel cars, the regional authority decided on Monday.

The Metropole du Grand Paris council said on its Twitter feed it had voted to ban diesel cars registered before Dec. 31, 2000 from the area within the A86 second ring-road, which includes Paris and 79 municipalities around it, a region with 5.61 million inhabitants.

The ban will use France’s new “Crit’Air” vignette system, which identifies cars’ age and pollution level with color-coded stickers. Cars with the Crit’Air 5 sticker (1997 to 2000-registered diesels) as well as cars without a sticker will be banned.

The council plans to gradually tighten regulations in order to allow only electric or hydrogen-fueled cars on Greater Paris roads by 2030. In central Paris, pre-2000 diesels have been banned since July 2017.

Fifteen French metropolitan areas including Lyon, Nice, Aix-Marseille and Toulouse last month agreed to install or reinforce low-emission zones by 2020. The French government hopes this will prevent European Union sanctions over non-respect of European air quality standards.
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In an abrupt change of plans, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opened the group’s national meeting Monday by announcing it will delay for at least several months any votes on proposed new steps to address the clergy sex abuse crisis that is rocking the church.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, of Galveston-Houston, said the delay was requested by the Vatican, which asked that the U.S. bishops wait until after a Vatican-convened global meeting on sex abuse in February.

DiNardo expressed disappointment but told the U.S. bishops, “I remain hopeful that this additional consultation will ultimately improve our response to the crisis we face.”

The bishops are meeting through Wednesday in Baltimore and had been expected to consider several steps to combat abuse, including a new code of conduct for themselves and the creation of a special commission to review complaints against the bishops.

At their meeting, which continues through Wednesday, the bishops may proceed with discussions of these proposals, which were drafted in September by the bishops’ Administrative Committee. But there will be no immediate vote.

Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, of Chicago, suggested that the bishops hold a special assembly in March to vote on the measures after considering the results of the global meeting in February.

Abuse scandals have roiled the Roman Catholic Church worldwide for decades, but there have been major developments this year in the U.S.

In July, Pope Francis removed U.S. church leader Theodore McCarrick as a cardinal after church investigators said an allegation that he groped a teenage altar boy in the 1970s was credible. Subsequently, several former seminarians and priests reported that they too had been abused or harassed by McCarrick as adults, triggering debate over who might have known and covered up McCarrick’s misconduct.

In August, a grand jury report in Pennsylvania detailed decades of abuse and cover-up in six dioceses, alleging that more than 1,000 children had been abused over the years by about 300 priests. Since then, a federal prosecutor in Philadelphia has begun working on a federal criminal case centered on child exploitation, and attorneys general in several other states have launched investigations.

DiNardo, in his address opening the bishops’ assembly, told survivors of clergy abuse that he was “deeply sorry.”

The church, he said, should not revictimize survivors “by demanding they heal on our timeline.”

Announcement of a delay in the voting drew skeptical reactions.

“We had this agenda, we were moving forward on these documents, this was our goal,” said Bishop Christopher Coyne, of the Vermont diocese of Burlington, and the communications chair for the three-day conference. “And now … it will look like we don’t have to come up with much.”

Coyne said he believed there were “no machinations” leading to the delay, but he had concerns about how it would be perceived outside the assembly hall.

“The Vatican just made a big mistake in asking US bishops to delay their votes on clergy abuse protocols,” tweeted John Gehring, the Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a Washington-based clergy network. “The optics are terrible, and it sends a message, intended or not, that Rome doesn’t recognize the urgency of the moment.”

 
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President Donald Trump, back in Washington Monday after commemorating the centenary of the end of World War I in Paris, immediately assailed Europe for its defense spending and trade surplus over the United States.

Trump, in a string of Twitter comments, said “much was accomplished” in his meetings with other world leaders. But he said it was “never easy bringing up the fact that the U.S. must be treated fairly, which it hasn’t, on both Military and Trade.”

The U.S. leader contended, “We pay for LARGE portions of other countries military protection, hundreds of billions of dollars, for the great privilege of losing hundreds of billions of dollars with these same countries on trade.”

 

Trump added, “I told them that this situation cannot continue – It is, and always has been, ridiculously unfair to the United States. Massive amounts of money spent on protecting other countries, and we get nothing but Trade Deficits and Losses. It is time that these very rich countries either pay the United States for its great military protection, or protect themselves… and Trade must be made FREE and FAIR!”

Trump has declared himself a “nationalist,” with an America First outlook on international relations. But in Paris on Sunday at the commemoration of the end of World War I, French President Emmanuel Macron, with Trump listening nearby, deplored rising nationalism throughout the world, declaring it a “betrayal of patriotism.”

Trump throughout his nearly two-year presidency has often complained that numerous European allies have yet to meet NATO’s 2024 goal of spending 2 percent of the size of their national economies on defense, chiefly funding for military weapons and armed forces.

Eight of the 29 members of the West’s main defense alliance, forged at the end of World War II, are expected to meet the target this year — the U.S., Britain, Greece, Estonia, Romania, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.

China is the biggest individual national trading partner with the U.S., but U.S. trade is collectively larger with the 28-nation European Union.

Trump has expressed his ire that Europe has a trade surplus with the U.S. — $101 billion in 2017 — meaning that the EU ships more goods and services worth that much to the U.S. than it imports from America.

In recent months, Trump has imposed higher tariffs on European steel and aluminum imports, while the EU responded with higher levies on iconic U.S. exports, such as blue jeans, motorcycles, orange juice and bourbon.

 

 

 

 

 

 
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British Prime Minister Theresa May says the West’s response to the nerve-agent poisoning of a former spy has seriously hurt Russia’s intelligence capability.

 

May’s office says she’ll urge countries “to stand up for the rules around the world” during a foreign-policy speech on Monday.

 

Britain accuses Russia of poisoning ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter with a Soviet-made nerve agent in the English city of Salisbury in March – a claim Moscow denies.

 

After the attack Britain and other countries expelled a total of 150 Russian spies working under diplomatic cover. Russia expelled a similar number of those countries’ envoys.

 

May plans to tell the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London that this was “the largest-ever collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers, fundamentally degrading Russian intelligence capability for years to come.”

 
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Prime Minister Theresa May will say on Monday Britain is “open to a different relationship” with Russia if Moscow takes a new path and stops “attacks” that undermine international treaties and security.

Just a year ago, May used her annual speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet to accuse Moscow of military aggression and of meddling in elections, some of her strongest criticism even before the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Salisbury.

This year, she will tell London’s financial center that the action taken since – including the largest ever coordinated expulsion of Russian intelligence officers – has deepened her belief in a “collective response” to such threats.

“We will continue to show our willingness to act, as a community of nations, to stand up for the rules around the world,” May will say, according to excerpts of her speech.

Describing evolving threats, May will say the past year, including Salisbury, has “shown that while the challenge is real, so is the collective resolve of likeminded partners to defend our values, our democracies, and our people.”

“But, as I also said a year ago, this is not the relationship with Russia that we want … We remain open to a different relationship – one where Russia desists from these attacks that undermine international treaties and international security,” she will say.

“And we hope that the Russian state chooses to take this path. If it does, we will respond in kind.”

May has said often that Britain’s decision to leave the European Union does not mean a retreat into isolationism, and her words again seem aimed at underlining London’s desire to play a weighty role in the world.

But with no mention of Brexit in the speech excerpts, she may be hoping to avoid going into too much detail of Britain’s negotiations to leave the EU, which have split her cabinet, her Conservative Party and Britain’s parliament.

 
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U.S. President Donald Trump and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, discussed how to respond to the killing last month of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a White House official said on Sunday.

The conversation took place during a Saturday dinner with heads of state and government gathered in Paris to mark the World War I Armistice centenary.

Khashoggi, a critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was killed at the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate by a team sent from Riyadh. Saudi authorities have acknowledged that the killing was premeditated, but his body has not been found.

Erdogan disclosed on Saturday that audio recordings of the killing had been given to the U.S., French, German and British governments, adding that the operation had been ordered at the “highest levels” of the Saudi government.

Trump expects to form a “stronger opinion” by this coming week on Khashoggi’s killing and Washington’s response, he said last Wednesday – adding that he was working with Congress, Turkey and Saudi Arabia to establish who bore responsibility.

In a phone call with the crown prince on Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “emphasized that the United States will hold all of those involved in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi accountable, and that Saudi Arabia must do the same,” the State Department said in a statement.

 
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Residents of the eastern Ukraine regions controlled by Russia-backed separatist rebels voted Sunday for local governments in elections denounced by Kyiv and the West.

The elections were to choose heads of government and legislature members in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, where separatists have fought Ukrainian forces since the spring of 2014 in a war that has killed more than 10,000 people.

Although a 2015 accord on ending the war calls for local elections in Donetsk and Luhansk, critics including Ukraine’s president, the U.S. and the European Union say the vote is illegitimate because it is conducted where Ukraine has no control.

But the separatists say the vote is a key step toward establishing full-fledged democracy in the regions.

“It’s another exam for the civic position, political position for the whole Donetsk Republic,” said Denis Pushilin, who became acting head of the Donetsk separatist regime since predecessor Alexander Zakharchenko was killed in a restaurant bombing in August.

His Luhansk counterpart, Leonid Pasechnik, said Sunday that “we are a free republic, a free country” and denied that the voting was being held contrary to the 2015 agreement signed in Minsk.

The leaders of Germany and France, which helped negotiate that accord, dismissed “the illegal and illegitimate elections … held today despite numerous appeals by the international community.”

“These are elections for entities that have no legitimacy under the Ukrainian constitution,” Kurt Volker, the U.S. special envoy for Ukraine, said last week.

“The people in eastern Ukraine will be better off within a unified Ukraine at peace rather than in a second-rate police state run by crooks and thugs, all subsidized by Russian taxpayers,” he said Sunday on Twitter.

Both regions reported voter turnout of more than 70 percent as of two hours before the polls closed at 8 p.m. (1700 GMT).

Later Sunday, the spokesman for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he discussed the elections with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron amid ceremonies in Paris commemorating the end of World War I Sunday.

In a statement after the meeting, Merkel and Macron said that holding “so-called” elections undermines Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, and urged all sides to respect the cease-fire and release political prisoners.

Germany, France and Ukraine are part of the so-called “Normandy format” countries seeking a resolution to the conflict. Russia is the fourth country in the format, which has not held talks in two years.

Andrei Yermolaev, an analyst at the New Ukraine think-tank in Kyiv, said “conducting the elections despite the opinions of Kyiv and the West means that the Kremlin completely controls the situation in the region and intends to use this `frozen conflict’ as a lever of pressure on the Ukrainian authorities.”
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Extreme weather events predicted by climate change sometimes mean more than just bad storms, sometimes they mean the exact opposite. In Germany, a hot, dry summer has left water levels at near historic lows, and that problem is rippling across the entire economy. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Four British ministers who back remaining in the European Union are on the verge of quitting Theresa May’s government over Brexit, the Sunday Times reported, as pressures built on the prime minister from all sides.

The newspaper also said that the European Union had rejected May’s plan for an independent mechanism to oversee Britain’s departure from any temporary customs arrangement it agrees. The newspaper sourced the development to British sources, and not sources in the EU team.

May is trying to hammer out the final details of the British divorce deal but the talks have become stuck over how the two sides can prevent a hard border from being required in Ireland.

Britain has proposed a UK-wide temporary customs arrangement with the EU to resolve the issue but Brexiteers in her party want London to have the final say on when that arrangement would end, to prevent it from being tied indefinitely to the bloc.

A senior cabinet minister was quoted in the paper as saying: “This is the moment she has to face down Brussels and make it clear to them that they need to compromise, or we will leave without a deal.”

An EU diplomat told Reuters earlier on Saturday that they were cautiously hopeful that an EU summit could happen in November to endorse the deal but that the volatile situation in Britain made it very difficult to predict.

Other EU diplomats said several issues remained unresolved.

May is expected to meet with her cabinet this week to set out her plans for the divorce deal. She was dealt a blow on Friday when junior minister Jo Johnston, who voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum, quit over her plan.

To add to the pressure, a leading member of a group of Brexiteer lawmakers in parliament joined with the Brexit spokesman for the small Northern Irish party that props up May’s party in government to warn that they could not vote for the deal as it currently stands.

Steve Baker, a former junior Brexit minister who resigned over May’s so-called Chequers proposals on Brexit, and Sammy Wilson of the DUP wrote in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper that they could not back a deal if it treated Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the country.

May had been expected to hold a vote in parliament on her deal before the end of the year.

A spokeswoman for May’s Downing Street office said the talks were going down to the wire. “The prime minister has always said these negotiations are tough and toughest in the final stages.

“The prime minister has told colleagues this week we should aim to conclude the withdrawal agreement as soon as possible but we will not do that at any cost.” 
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U.S. President Donald Trump canceled a visit to an American cemetery outside Paris Saturday during the president’s visit to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. 

A White House statement said the president’s visit was canceled because of scheduling and logistical difficulties caused by the weather. 

Instead, an American delegation led by Chief of Staff General John Kelly and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joe Dunford visited the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial under gray skies and drizzle, paying respect to the nearly 2,300 war dead buried there.

The area was the site of the Battle of Belleau Wood in June 1918. In addition to the 2,288 graves of American soldiers, the cemetery contains a memorial to 1,060 service members who went missing in action. 

Also Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel held hands during a ceremony at the site in the Compiegne Forest, north of Paris, where allies and defeated Germans signed the agreement that ended World War One.

On Sunday, Armistice Day, Trump will join dozens of world leaders at a centenary ceremony at Paris’ Arc de Triomphe. The ceremony is to remember the fallen soldiers of a century ago in the war that ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

On Saturday morning, Trump and Macron discussed their differences about European security. The meeting came soon after Donald Trump arrived in Paris and criticized his host via Twitter, calling Macron’s support for a European military force “very insulting.”

In the touchdown tweet, Trump suggested Europe first pay “its fair share” of NATO before contemplating a Europe-wide force.

​As they began their meeting Saturday morning at the Elysee Palace, the U.S. president again called for better burden sharing for the cost of defending Europe. 

“We want a strong Europe,” said Trump. 

Macron replied: “I do believe we need more European capacities, more European defense.” 

Trump and Macron avoided any criticism of each other in front of the media. 

Macron, during a visit to the World War One Western Front at Verdun, told Europe 1 radio that in face of a revived threat from Moscow that Europe needed to “defend itself better alone” and Europeans cannot protect themselves without a “true European army.”

Macron, in the interview, also blasted Trump’s recent announcement that Washington will withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) limiting nuclear weapons that U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to.

The “main victim” of the withdrawal, Macron argued, is “Europe and its security.”

French officials, however, say — without elaborating — there was a misunderstanding by Trump about Macron’s comments, noting the U.S. president told his French counterpart in their Saturday meeting: “I think we are much closer than it seems.” 
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