Pierre Boulez, Christine Schäfer, Chicago Symphony Orchestra (opening concert of the Musik Triennale Köln 2000)

Modern Slavery

North Korea has the highest prevalence of modern slavery globally, with one in 10 of the population, or 2.6 million people, victims of modern slavery. A third, or 15 million, of victims of modern slavery enter through forced marriage, an issue that disproportionately affects women and girls.

Google hit with record $5 billion EU antitrust fine *

EU regulators hit Google with a record 4.34 billion euros ($5 billion) antitrust fine on Wednesday for using its Android mobile operating system to squeeze out rivals.

* and the Facebook, which "apps" are inside the system of the devices (because the labels did allow it) and cannot to be removed? How much they will be fined? (I wrote to the European Commissars Vera Jurová and Cecilia Malmström on that issue)

Iannis Xenakis - REBONDS a.b. - Kuniko Kato

RSF describes Turkey as “the world’s biggest prison for professional journalists”

Turkey’s former prime minister Binali Yildirim, and President Erdogan’s son-in-law and powerful treasury and finance minister Berat Albayrak, and members of their families have filed defamation actions against award-winning journalist and International Consortium of Investigative Journalists member Pelin Ünker and her newspaper, Cumhuriyet. The influential Turkish figures do not claim factual errors or inaccuracies but seek financial penalties for alleged damage to their reputations.

Media freedom was one of the key demands of the revolution that toppled the Shah and swept Ayatollah Khomeini to power in 1979, but it is a promise that has never been kept. The media are mostly under the Islamic regime’s close control and there has been no let-up in the persecution of independent journalists, citizen journalists, and media outlets. Media personnel are still constantly exposed to intimidation, arbitrary arrest, and long jail sentences imposed by revolutionary courts at the end of unfair trials. Despite an improvement in its international relations, Iran continues to be one of the world’s five biggest prisons for media personnel.

The New Octopus

Today, as technology creates new forms of power, we must also create new forms of countervailing civic power. We must build a new civic infrastructure that imposes new kinds of checks and balances. But where new firms, however innovative, outstrip our ability to assure their accountability, then we have to ask hard questions about whether we want to pursue such innovation in the first place.

Iannis Xenakis - REBONDS a.b. - Kuniko Kato

U.S. accuses Russian spies of 2016 election hacking

Officers of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, covertly monitored computers of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Democratic campaign committees, and stole large amounts of data, the indictment said.

Forty-two years ago, a Russian leader privately offered unlimited assistance to a presidential candidate. Given the continuity over the years of Russia’s covert-action methods, it is of little surprise to see Russia doing in 2016 what Brezhnev offered to do in 1975. The difference is that this time the offer was accepted, while in 1975 the United States was led by a man of great experience and absolute integrity, who ignored the offer.

Trump also refrained from publicly criticizing Russia’s 2014 seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region, another geopolitical win for Putin against Western efforts to isolate him.

Trump has repeatedly denied his campaign colluded with Russia and has characterized the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a witch hunt. Trump is infuriated by any suggestion he might owe his election victory to Russia.

Here are 10 critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways

Oliver Knussen: "Cantata" for oboe and string trio

Amnesty International estimates that at least 97 prisoners of conscience are currently held in Vietnam’s prisons

serving a 10-year prison term following her June 2017 conviction on charges of spreading “propaganda against the state” under Article 88 of Vietnam’s Penal Code, Quynh (Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh) had blogged about human rights abuses and official corruption for more than a decade.

She had also criticized the government’s response to a 2016 toxic waste spill by the Taiwan-owned Formosa Plastics Group that destroyed the livelihoods of tens of thousands of Vietnamese living in four coastal provinces.

Tibetan Villagers Tear-Gassed, Beaten For Mine Protest

Chinese police have launched a violent tear-gas assault on Tibetan villagers in Qinghai’s Yulshul prefecture, ending a two-month protest against suspected mining operations on local mountains, according to a local source.

Kaija Saariaho - Circle Map - FRSO/Susanna Mälkki

Bad Romanian Horse Meat Stampedes Across Europe

Last year, the Agromexim-Cetina partnership generated a new European alert for cadmium- contaminated meat — its fifth one. The meat was sold to the Italian company Boventi SPA, which sent it on to Germany and Hungary. The source of the cadmium contamination has never been identified, according to the Romanian authorities. Meanwhile, Chevideco, the Belgian buyer, continues to buy horse meat from Agromexim.

Vivaldi's "La Folia" (Madness), arranged by Jeannette Sorrell after Sonata XII, Apollo's Fire

Former Pakistan PM Sharif Sentenced To 10 Years Over Panama Papers

Former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has been sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10.6 million on corruption charges linked to 2016 Panama Papers revelations about his family’s properties overseas.

Elderly and disabled civilians were burned alive

Reiterating his call on the government and African Union to establish a hybrid court for South Sudan, he said the soldiers had slit elderly villagers’ throats, hanged women for resisting looting and shot fleeing civilians.

Nobel widow Liu Xia leaves China after 8 years’ house arrest

The release of Liu Xia, who has never been charged with any crime, is the result of years of campaigning by Western governments and activists and comes just days before the one-year anniversary of the death of dissident Liu Xiaobo while he was serving a prison sentence for inciting subversion.

Oliver Knussen - Horn Concerto

The composer and conductor Oliver Knussen has died

Oliver Knussen has died; he was 66. A pupil of John Lambert and Gunther Schuller, Knussen made a vivid impression at a very early age; his First Symphony was written when he was just 15.

A former Facebook moderator says she had to review 8,000 posts a day

Katz said she was not asked to report the accounts sharing the material — a fact that "disturbed" her. "If the user's account was less than 30 days old we would deactivate the account as a fake account. If the account was older than 30 days we would simply remove the content and leave the account active," she said.

Beethoven - Egmont Overture - Apollo's Fire/Jeannette Sorrell

Distorted neutron stars give up secrets of dense nuclear matter

GW170817 offers astrophysicists new and exciting information about the equation of state (EOS) of neutron stars. The EOS describes the complex behaviour of the dense nuclear matter that makes up neutron stars. Little is currently known about the EOS because it is difficult to glean information from conventional astronomical observations and because theoretical calculations of dense nuclear matter are extremely difficult to do. Before GW170817, the most important piece of information about the EOS came from observations published in 2010 and 2013, which showed that neutron stars can have masses at least as large as two solar masses.

Stravinsky - Petruschka - Yuja Wang

British woman dies after Novichok poisoning

A 44-year-old British woman died on Sunday after being exposed to the Novichok nerve agent in western England just a few miles from where Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were struck down by the same agent four months ago.

Mining the Sky

Space is relatively untouched. It has not yet been exploited and pillaged—and when it is, I would hope that everybody could benefit from it. If space becomes entirely privatized, however, I worry that the profits will simply flow to the private sector—and thanks to countries like Luxembourg, those profits won’t be taxed.

Gender and Climate Change

The Climate Change Gender Action Plansare nationally recognized strategies with a unique methodology for training and building the capacity of women and women’s organizations on the linkages between gender and climate change. 

The EU's dodgy Article 13 copyright directive has been rejected

The Copyright Directive, which contained the particularly concerning Article 13, was rejected by 318 votes to 278, with 31 abstentions

Pierre Boulez plays Douze Notations

Gustav Leonhardt: Louis Couperin's Suite in D

How US sex traffickers recruit jailed women for prostitution

“The pimps would use bail as a way to control us and keep us in debt bondage,” said one trafficking survivor from Tampa, Florida. She claimed she was forced to work as a prostitute to pay off her bail debt and locked inside a house and beaten if she didn’t bring home enough money.

China's campaign of destruction at Larung Gar

China's attempts to block evicted residents from returning to Larung Gar violates Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.”  These restrictions, along with the enforced cancellation of prayer ceremonies at the site also violate Tibetans' rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association under Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The subsequent restrictions imposed on former residents from being able to practice at Larung Gar or joining new monasteries are also in violation of these rights, along with Article 27 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which specifies that “everyone has the right to take part in cultural life and to the freedom indispensable for creative activity”

"Nobody can do it for me"

"Everyone has to make their decisions, but I think we can safely say millions of others are here to offer support and hope. Nobody can do it for me, but I don’t have to do it alone."

Deluge of electronic waste turning Thailand into 'world's rubbish dump'

“Places like America and Europe need to realise they are going to have to start recycling their own electronic waste and stop sweeping the negative effects from north to south,”

As Mexico’s oil sector sputters, crime and violence rattle industry towns

They beat his bare buttocks with a paddle and repeatedly threatened to rape him. One of the assailants put a gun to his head, while another grabbed his cell phone and began posting live video to Herver’s own Facebook feed.

Boulez - Livre pour quatuor à cordes - Quatuor Diotima

Confirmed Artists to Represent Their Countries at the 2019 Venice Biennale

We're keeping a running list of the curators and artists who have signed on for next year's art extravaganza.

Tourists: go home!

In Lisbon, too, they are feeling the negative impact of mass tourism. Fátima Bernardo, assistant professor of social sciences at the University of Évora in Portugal, fears that the Alfama district in Lisbon may face a similar fate to Ciutat Vella

What we know so far about the Jokhang fire

Earlier this year, Lhasa's Jokhang temple, one of the most sacred sites in Tibetan Buddhism, was engulfed in flames. Since then, Free Tibet has been working tirelessly to uncover the truth of what happened at the Jokhang and the extent of the damage. This report details our findings so far and, for the first time, reveals satellite photography of the site taken shortly after the blaze was put out.

Szymanowski - String Quartet No 2 Op 56 - Belcea Quartet

Observations of the missing baryons in the warm–hot intergalactic medium

A theoretical solution to this paradox locates the missing baryons in the hot and tenuous filamentary gas between galaxies, known as the warm–hot intergalactic medium.

Venezuela: impunity amid dismal human rights situation

Under the previous Attorney-General, who was replaced in August 2017, 357 security officers were reportedly under investigation in relation to the killings. But since then, there has been no information publicly available about the cases, with a key obstacle being that the Bureau for Scientific, Criminal, and Forensic Investigations (CICPC) that is in charge of the investigations, is also allegedly responsible for most of the killings. 

The OLPs were in January 2017 replaced with another operation, called the Operations for the Humanitarian Liberation of the People, which is much less transparent and difficult to track than the OLPs, but civil society accounts suggest that the killings have continued. The report also documents the killing of 39 detainees in the state of Amazonas in 2017 and of seven members of an alleged armed group in Caracas in 2018, where security forces allegedly used excessive force. 

Impunity also appears to be pervasive in favour of security officers allegedly responsible for the killing of at least 46 people during protestors last year. The former Attorney-General had issued at least 54 arrest warrants but so far, the UN Human Rights Office is aware of only one case in which a formal trial has started. Evidence has reportedly disappeared from case files, and members of the Attorney-General’s office in charge of investigating the cases were replaced when the new Attorney-General took office in August last year. The Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) has also reportedly blocked investigations.

World trending to hit 50% renewables by 2050

The clean energy analysis firm estimates that in a mere 33 years, the world will generate almost 50 percent of its electricity from renewable energy, and coal will make up just 11 percent of the total electricity mix.

Add in hydroelectric power and nuclear energy, and greenhouse-gas-free electricity sources climb to 71 percent of the world's total electricity generation. 

A company called NET Power has begun testing a unique demonstration power plant in La Porte, Texas, that burns natural gas but releases no emissions into the atmosphere. How can it do this? The natural gas is burned in pure oxygen rather than ambient air, and the resulting heated carbon dioxide (CO2) is used to power a turbine instead of heating steam or gas.

EU votes for copyright law that would make internet a 'tool for control'

Earlier this year, a group of 169 European academics specialising in intellectual property urged MEPs to reject the “misguided” plans, which they said would “likely impede the free flow of information that is of vital importance to democracy”. Scores of academics have since added their names to the letter, which also says the proposals would be likely to harm journalists, photographers and many “non-institutional creators and producers of news”, including freelancers. The UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, has also raised concerns about “prepublication censorship”, with automatic filters being unable to detect fair comment, satire, criticism and parody. In a rare feat, the law has united consumer and tech lobbies in opposition

The Washington state law prohibits home and mobile Internet providers from blocking or throttling lawful Internet traffic and from charging online services for prioritization. The rules will be enforced by the state attorney general under Washington's Consumer Protection Act.

Swiss authorities propose major money-laundering law reforms

Switzerland’s federal government appears poised to crack down on money laundering in the wake of banking scandals and investigations linked to FIFA chiefs 

The basis for killing network neutrality rules is bogus

“A whole lot of other issues aren’t getting much attention,” he noted. Like, “how to close the digital divide, how to improve digital equity."

As Trump courts Kim, a reminder of the regime's brutality

- a female prisoner losing consciousness after enduring a beating designed to trigger premature labour, with prison officials killing her baby before she could regain consciousness;

- a prisoner raped by a security officer, after which the officer pushed a wooden stick inside her vagina and beat her lower body, resulting in her death within a week;

- the deliberate starvation, malnutrition, overwork and death of countless prisoners, including between 1,500–2,000 prisoners, mostly children, who are believed to have died each year from malnutrition in one camp alone, with many other prisoners beaten to death for failing to meet production quotas;

- a soldier supervising a forced labor site rolling a log down a steep mountainside, killing ten prisoners as they were carrying logs up the mountain;

- routine public executions of prisoners, carried out in front of both children and adults, designed to subdue the prison population.

...

These examples make up only some of what is in the report. The IBA report estimates between 80,000 and 130,000 individuals are being held in these prisons today, accused of political wrongdoing. The reason for incarcerating children, according to this study, is that the regime enforces a policy of eliminating the "seed" of three generations of its political enemies.

“He’s the head of a country, and I mean, he’s the strong head, don’t let anyone think anyone different,” Trump said. “He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

"I fear that today’s unjustified firing of a dissenting voice on the editorial pages will only serve to diminish an opinion section that was once one of America’s best"

China has backed United Nations sanctions against North Korea, but it has also recently indicated it is willing to offer economic assistance — a move some see as intended to anger Washington.

Immediately after the meeting Trump claimed that North Korea had begun the destruction of a missile engine testing site or would begin as soon as Kim returned from the summit. In return Trump ordered the suspension of military exercises with South Korea, a longstanding demand of the Pyongyang regime. This week the Pentagon confirmed that planning for the next scheduled exercises in August had halted

Sources inside the notoriously secretive state say that a top army general has been executed by firing squad – because he gave his troops and their families extra food.

[North Korea’s fear of Chinese control is one area where North Korean and American interests of containing China actually align.]

“Taiwan is grateful to the efforts of like-minded countries that have chosen to take a stand against Chinese bullying of private enterprises,”

[America’s economic prospects are clouded in doubt to make other countries gradually move away from its currency and T-bonds.]

[China has been accumulating indebtedness faster than it has been growing. When so-called hidden debt is taken into account, the country is now incurring maybe one-and-a-half times as much debt as it is producing nominal gross domestic product, even if the official GDP figures were not substantially inflated, which they most certainly are.]

[Trump’s policies are causing a consolidation of a shared anti-American security outlook that unites the various groups found across the Shia world.]

World Cup: Repression and War Crimes

Free speech campaigners rolled out a soccer pitch in central Paris on Wednesday with posters of jailed journalists as the players, in a demonstration about press freedom in Russia on the eve of the World Cup.

On the international stage, Russia is providing weapons, military support, and diplomatic cover to the Syrian government, despite evidence that Syrian forces have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ponsatí’s lawyer considers summoning former Spanish ministers to Scotland court

In an interview with the Catalan News Agency last month, Aamer Anwar, Ponsatí’s lawyer, claimed that the Spanish authorities are making "an abuse of the European arrest warrants” in trying to extradite Catalan officials abroad, and he accused the Spanish judiciary of “changing the rules of the game” to ensure the officials are returned to Spain. "The Spanish authorities keep shifting the goalposts. They can’t keep trying once, and then twice and then three and four times,” he said, calling such behavior “unacceptable.”

Don't let the EU break our Internet

Tell your MEP to save it before 20 June. On 20-21 June, the European Parliament will vote on the Copyright Directive. Members of the parliament are the only ones that can stand in the way of bad copyright legislation. Tell them you need them to protect your Internet against surveillance and censorship machines

Alice in Wonderland (Unsuk Chin)

Materials as Musical Muses

The emotional connection offered by music, Buongiorno Nardelli hopes, could help audiences realize how rich and beautiful materials can be. He is now designing an installation in the form of a gigantic crystal structure embedded with sonified data from that material. Visitors to the installation would have the sensation of walking inside a crystal and hearing the beating of its phonons or the relentless dance of its electrons.

Anthony Braxton after his concert in Porto

Thanks to Anthony Braxton who told us everything. Thanks to the saxophonist and composer João Guimarães, for holding the lighting and posing interesting questions.

Response to the Belgian Art Prize exclusionary shortlist 2019

As active practitioners, we know that a thriving and complex artistic landscape is only possible when artists of different genders, sexualities, ethnic backgrounds, social classes, generations and so forth, are able to access and participate in it, and enrich it with their sensibilities and world views. In contrast to the apathy demonstrated in the selection of 2019 candidates, we wish to affirm to each other that we stand for an inclusive artistic community that finds its strength in diversity.

The flagrant exclusivity of this year’s prize candidates and its denial of not only social but also aesthetic reality (gender being just one of its glaring discriminatory categories) does not represent how we see ourselves, or our community, and raises consequential questions on how privilege might be distributed within it. The Belgian art world is still very far from having the openness we aspire towards, but we believe it is ready to recognise and reject the regressive affront this year’s selection has forced upon it.

In 2018, the art world and society at large are finally acknowledging inherited failures, and we insist on not sustaining them by assenting to the kind of agenda advanced by the BelgianArtPrize. We sign this letter to collectively and visibly inform you that we stand for a different set of values than what you’ve put forward as representing our community. We demand that Belgian public arts forums and institutions make the concerted effort to root out overt discrimination, not through nominal representation, but by acting to assimilate celebration of our diversity.

Inuit culture struggles with warming world

a climatologist based in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, said the region is a volatile place climatically, with extreme swings in the weather that can amplify – and sometimes mask – the changes that are happening. Compared to historical terms, winter is about six weeks shorter, while the region’s sea ice coverage is about third smaller than it was a decade ago.

The shutdown of the Nobel

The accusations against Arnault and Engdahl range from accepting financial benefits -- through a joint cultural forum they once ran together with funding from the academy -- to using insider information to bet on Nobel prize winners. But the most profound and disturbing accusations are those from the women, some of whom remain clearly traumatized by what they say Arnault did to them. Arnault could not be reached for comment by the time this story went to print.

• we talk on corruption and on systematic rapes and abuses (which lasted for decades), perpetrated by a French and cleared by the Swedish Academy, in the very same country that stalked Julian Assange for alleged "sex by surprise". It's like when US' "special pressecutor" grilled Bill Clinton at greatest epoch of Weinstein and the monsters paedophile gays of the church.

Hurricanes set to become wetter

On average, the rainfall rate from the simulated future storms increased by 24%. As a group, these storms had 6% stronger average hourly maximum wind speeds and moved 9% slower. 

MH17 downed by Russian military missile system

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down over the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014. All 298 people onboard were killed.

Chloe Chua: Self in Mind (Jaehyuck Choi) / Winter (Vivaldi)

Save net neutrality

When the FCC repeal goes into effect on June 11th, “the Internet as we know it” will not suddenly die. Nothing will happen right away. Shills for big telecom companies will immediately start saying “See? The sky didn’t fall, guess we never needed net neutrality in the first place.”

The big ISPs aren’t going to immediately start blocking websites or rolling out harmful paid prioritization scams. Not while Congress and the courts are still deliberating. Not while major states like California and New York are considering legislation. Not while they know the whole Internet is poised to attack as soon as they break the rules.

Even if the ISPs get their way in the end, the Internet’s death will be slow. You probably won’t even notice it happening at first. That’s what makes it so sinister. But over time, there will be less innovative startups, less choice and diversity of opinion online, less creativity, more centralization, less awesome. We’ll also lose one of the most important tools we have for exposing corruption, challenging tyranny, and holding the powerful accountable.

But we’re not going to let that happen. We’ve turned net neutrality into a mainstream issue for the first time ever. And now we’re building a movement to make sure that we protect it for generations to come.

The fight ahead is not going to be easy, but victory is within reach.

EU blocking cities' efforts to curb Airbnb

The explosive rise of short-stay Airbnb holiday rentals may be shutting locals out of housing and changing neighbourhoods across Europe, but cities’ efforts to halt it are being stymied by EU policies to promote the “sharing economy”

Facebook's increasing PR job in Brussels

Facebook is a regular subject of controversies connected to the use of data shared by its users - in 2013, for example, after the revelations of Edward Snowden, or more recently with the Cambridge Analytica affair. As a consequence, the company has been trying its best to polish its image and reassure both the public and institutions. To this end, it has formed a network to amplify its influence in Washington as well as in Brussels.

“You picked this format for a reason,” one parliamentarian hissed at Zuckerberg as the proceedings ended.

Facebook CEO exploited ability to access data from any user’s friend network, US case claims

Don't execute Noura for self defense against the man who raped her!

At 16, Noura was forcibly married off by her father. She refused, and in protest left her family home on the outskirts of Khartoum to stay with her aunt in Sinnar, a city almost 250 kilometers away. Noura lived with her relative for three years before her father called to say that the wedding was cancelled, and that she should come home.

Upon her arrival, Noura found that she had been tricked, that the wedding to which she had never agreed was still happening, and shortly after was given away to her unchosen husband.

Slovak Police Investigate Journalists, not Murderers

Slovak police had invited investigative journalist Pavla Holcova to what she thought would be a friendly conversation to help their investigation into the murder of her friend and colleague, Jan Kuciak.

She was asked about cases that other investigative reporters were digging into, as well as Kuciak’s investigation into a man who now is a suspect in the murder - an investigation Kuciak was pursuing independently of his work with OCCRP. 

Alexandra Dovgan plays Gillock

Hillary Clinton: Need to take reports of Chinese meddling seriously

“Experts are sounding the alarm about Chinese efforts to gain political power and influence policy decisions,” she said during a speech in Auckland Monday night.

“(Academic) Anne-Marie Brady of the University of Canterbury has rightly called this a new global battle, and it’s just getting started,” added Clinton.

China vehemently denies allegations that it tries to influence the domestic politics of other countries for its own benefit.

Clinton’s comments follow a report by Brady published last month in the Journal of Democracy, accusing Beijing of carrying out a “concerted foreign-influence campaign” in New Zealand.

“The campaign aims to further the political and economic agendas of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by co-opting local elites, securing access to strategic information and resources, and manipulating public discourse,” said the report.

Prof Anne-Marie Brady from the University of Canterbury has frequently warned of growing Chinese influence in New Zealand, a message echoed by Hillary Clinton on a recent trip to the country, saying New Zealand needed to take the threat “seriously”.

US Senate Unanimously Passes Resolution on Tibetan Reincarnation

Marking the first time ever that a national legislature has supported the Tibetan Buddhist community’s right to identify and install their religious leaders, the United States Senate unanimously passed S.Res.429, which calls any interference by the Government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the religious process “invalid”. The resolution also commemorated the 59th anniversary of Tibet’s 1959 uprising as “Tibetan Rights Day”.

Three-member European Parliamentary Delegation led by MEP Thomas Mann, MEP Csaba Sogor and MEP Ramon Tremosa received a private audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama on Wednesday morning. The delegation is on a six-day visit to Dharamshala, the seat of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration.

In an exclusive interview with Tibet.net, MEP Thomas Mann said that the meeting entailed important discussion and marked a special occasion as it coincided with Europe Day.

“In whole Europe, people are celebrating the way of European Union, our values, progress and also our problems. So on this special day, we had the opportunity of meeting His Holiness. He underlined how important the European Union is. Although he knows that we have some conflicts and differences but he said, ‘the most important is what you have done in all the last years… So its most important and your fight for freedom is very important,” MEP Mann said.

미로

BlackRock steps up lobbying of the European Commission

BlackRock met EU officials to discuss financial market matters more times than any other company in the seven months to July, in a sign of the growing influence of the world’s largest asset manager. The US giant, which has $4.5tn in assets under management, had more meetings with European Commission officials ... than Goldman Sachs, HSBC and Deutsche Bank.

India: teenage girl raped and burned to death

A 16-year-old girl has been kidnapped and gang raped, then burned to death when her family tried to seek justice, in the latest case of horrific sexual violence to emerge in India.

"Instant Suspendu"

THE DAPHNE PROJECT

Six months ago, Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was brutally killed by a car bomb just meters from her home. The investigation into her killing is ongoing, but there is little doubt that she was murdered because of her work. With a brazen, unapologetic and uncompromising style, she denounced corruption, nepotism, clientelism, and all kinds of criminal behaviors in her tiny EU member state.

A group of 45 journalists representing 18 news organizations from 15 countries picked up Daphne’s work after it was abruptly halted by her gruesome death on the doorstep of Europe. For five months they kept digging — poring over her findings, gathering documents, talking to sources — to try to get to the bottom of the many leads the formidable woman left behind.

The Daphne Project was coordinated and led by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based organization established specifically to continue the work of killed, imprisoned, or otherwise incapacitated journalists.

Spain's terrorist "justice" and Iran's terrorist police

Among the politicians facing charges of rebellion is Jordi Sanchez, the latest candidate put forward by Catalan lawmakers to become leader of the region. Supreme court judge Pablo Llarena refused last week to release him from jail and he faces up to 25 years on charges of rebellion, marking the latest of four unsuccessful attempts to elect a new leader. If a new leader is not named before the end of May, Catalonia will be forced to call another election.

Shocking video footage of a young woman being wrestled to the floor by Iranian “morality police” because her hijab was loose has sparked outrage after it was posted online.

I hardly can believe that the war criminal Bashar al-Assad will be not arrested

Military help over the past three years from Russia and Iran, which also backs Lebanon’s Hezbollah group and Shi’ite Muslim militias in Iraq, has allowed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to crush the rebel threat to topple him.

For the parent of a murdered Syrian child, the current western focus on the exact method of murder must feel strange. As if Assad was well within his rights to slaughter innocents using regular bombs, and his only offence was to use chlorine or sarin, inflicting a death so painful the footage is unbearable to watch. So unless there’s a plan for action once guilt is established, demanding an investigation sounds a lot like an excuse to do nothing in the hope that soon we’ll all be talking about something else.

Syria will be one of the battlefields, most likely the key battlefield, in which that confrontation plays itself out. As clashes between Israel and Iran mount, it is hard to see this White House staying out of the fight.

Tell your MEP: Stop Copyright Censorship

MEPs on the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties committee​ are about to cast crucial votes on rules attacking the very foundation of the web.