Saturday after Saturday, the Turkish police detain about twenty citizens gathered in the center of Istanbul who ask for justice for their missing relatives. The city government prohibits the protest and orders the deployment of security forces

The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, affirmed this Saturday that “he will not intervene or pressure” the decisions of the Prosecutor's Office after the capture of his son Nicolás, investigated for the possible crime of money laundering and illicit enrichment.

“As a person and a father, so much self-destruction and the fact that one of my children goes to jail hurts me a lot; as President of the Republic, I assure you that the Prosecutor's Office will have all the guarantees on my part to proceed in accordance with the law,” said the president. on his Twitter account.

Nicolás Petro, deputy of the Assembly of the department of Atlántico, was arrested along with his ex-wife Daysuris Vásquez, who at the beginning of the year accused him of receiving a large sum of money from a drug trafficker for the campaign of the current president and of keeping that money. The Prosecutor's Office reported that the arrests took place “today, July 29, 2023, around 06:00 (11:00 GMT), in compliance with the provisions of the 16th Municipal Criminal Court with the Function of Guarantee Control of Bogotá”.

I wish my son luck and strength.. May these events forge your character and you can reflect on your own mistakes. As I stated before the attorney general, I will not intervene or pressure his decisions; let the law freely guide the process,” added the Colombian president after the news.

The detainees will be placed at the disposal of a criminal judge and a restrictive measure of liberty will be requested.. On March 21, the Prosecutor's Office announced that it was criminally investigating Nicolás Petro for his alleged meetings with drug traffickers in jail and for “possible money laundering” after his ex-wife assured in an interview with Semana magazine that the drug trafficker Samuel Santander Lopesierra, alias the Marlboro man, gave him “more than 600 million pesos (about $153,000 today) for the father's campaign.”

“That never reached the campaign legally because he kept that money, and so did others,” added the woman, who mentioned that Nicolás Petro also received 200 million pesos (about $51,000) from the controversial businessman Alfonso Turco Hilsaca, who also did not They went to the campaign.

“My hands and fingers are crippled from the frequent use of handcuffs, but they won't beat me,” says the president and founder of the now-defunct El Periódico, José Rubén Zamora, from his cell in the Mariscal Zavala military prison in Guatemala City. Saturday is serving one year in jail, after he was arrested on July 29, 2022 at his home, after a raid by dozens of prosecutors and agents of the National Civil Police at the headquarters of this newspaper that in 2021 received the Rey Award from Spain to the Outstanding Media of Ibero-America.

The Public Ministry's Special Prosecutor Against Impunity requested a 40-year prison sentence against him for the crimes of money laundering and other assets (20 years), influence peddling (12) and blackmail (8), although ultimately, The Eighth Criminal Sentencing Court of Guatemala sentenced him only on June 14 to six uncommutable years in prison for money laundering and other assets, while it acquitted him of the other two crimes considering that they had not been accredited by the Prosecutor's Office .

Specifically, the Court considers proven the accusation of the Prosecutor's Office in the sense that Zamora took actions so that the former director of the Banco de los Trabajadores Ronald García Navarijo received 300,000 quetzales (37,500 euros) and, in turn, he obtained a check for the same economic amount to deposit it in an Aldea Global, SA account. of which the owner of El Periódico was the legal representative “and thus be able to dispose of that money whose origin is illegal”. The intention, as argued by one of the judges of the Eighth Court, was to give the money an “appearance of legality to hide its illegal origin,” which was an offense “against the national economy and the stability and solidity of the Guatemalan financial system.”. For his part, Zamora maintains that this money comes from the sale of a work of art and even showed the media a photo of it to justify the origin of the 300,000 quetzales.

The Prosecutor's Office was not satisfied with this sentence, for which reason it has filed an appeal, in order to increase the prison sentence against Zamora to 40 years, insisting that his investigation “has no relation to his quality as a journalist, but with money laundering in his capacity as a businessman”.

For its part, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has launched a campaign to demand the “immediate release” of the man who founded El Periódico in 1996 and published its last edition on May 15.. This organization denounces that Zamora, who is in “undignified conditions”, was sentenced “without a fair trial” after being “the victim of judicial harassment that intensified under the Presidency of Alejandro Giammattei” in Guatemala. It so happened that during the process, the journalist had to change lawyers up to nine times, after several of his lawyers were also criminalized and even imprisoned, while others went into exile to avoid being arrested.

anti-corruption investigations

RSF recalls that El Periódico was always characterized by its “shocking investigations into the corruption of the elites in power”, which dotted the current administration of Giammattei. It also points out that Zamora himself revealed last May to a joint mission of RSF and other organizations in defense of press freedom in Guatemala who were able to visit him that he is a “victim of psychological torture.”

For RSF, the sentencing of Zamora, which occurred just 10 days before the first round of the Guatemalan elections, held on June 25, “had the objective of sowing terror and dissuading journalists from publishing information that was upsetting to the power “. Likewise, it recalls that the same Prosecutor's Office that requested 40 years in prison against the founder of El Periódico, requested on July 12 the suspension of the legal personality of the Semilla political party, which was the second most voted party in the elections and whose candidate, Bernardo Arévalo de León, aspires to the Presidency of Guatemala in the second round of August 20.

“Journalism is in danger in Guatemala,” warns RSF, which is why it urges the population to urgently sign the petition urging the Guatemalan authorities to “immediately release” José Rubén Zamora and drop all charges against him, taking into account He says that he faces two other criminal proceedings for an alleged conspiracy to obstruct justice and an alleged use of false documents.

The routine in the 'refrigerated mausoleum'

From his cell, Zamora, at 66, continues to write a blog in which he points out that, “even if their fiercest enemies advise them, I will be here waiting for the moment of justice and truth.”. The journalist recounts his routine in the isolation module where he is in the same prison where the protagonists of his investigative reports are held, including former Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina, who has been incarcerated since September 2015 for various cases of corruption.

“In the refrigerated mausoleum where I live or perhaps rather die without pause, subject, in winter and summer, to four daily tsunamis of dense dust that relentlessly enter through the high rectangular vents on the front wall of my sumptuous tomb, they have dried and burned my eyes and flooded my ears, nose, pores and lungs and that once introduced they cannot be removed from the body”, he laments.

Thus, he denounces that, as a whole, this “new reality of 12 months has damaged my eyesight, my voice has almost disappeared, caused reflux and perennial allergies”. Zamora goes on to say that “at certain times of the day, the dense and suffocating dust resembles a static cloud, to a large extent because air does not flow and only the cold is a constant due to the fact that the sun enters through high and elevated vents. rectangular between 4:30 p.m. and 5:15 p.m. depending on the time of year.

Despite all this, he stresses that “not everything is bad”, because for an hour a day he goes for a walk on a 12.5-meter sidewalk, “locked in a kind of hermetic chicken coop with large padlocks, watched over by four high-resolution cameras and guarded by six well-armed guards 24 hours a day and finally surrounded by a metal wall about 2.8 to 3 meters high, topped by coiled barbed wire.”

Zamora's defense has already filed a special appeal against the sentence to request the acquittal of the crime for which he was convicted and order his release. The day Zamora was sentenced, he compared the Guatemalan justice system to the “inquisition” by accusing him without evidence and denounced that the Central American country has become a “dictatorship” in which all his rights to defense and due process have been “violated”. . The journalist also announced that he will appeal to the Court

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to obtain the justice that, in his opinion, he has not achieved in Guatemala.

Ask. After World War II, Germany and Japan were the two great powers that opted for a position of neutrality.. But that changed a long time ago. Can't you be neutral today?

Answer. Japan was not neutral. He is an ally of the state

The polarization that the European Union (EU) causes in the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party will make it impossible to even discuss the program with which it will run in the 2024 European elections. The date for next weekend that the party Executive had set at the congress that is being held in the capital of Saxony-Anhalt is finally diluted to January. “Things could get tough. We hope we can manage with night sessions but if there is no agreement we will not have the debate program until January next year,” said AfD co-president Tino Chrupalla.. His partner in charge, Alice Weidel, already assumes that “it is very likely that we will not get the program and we will have to leave in January.”

This would mean that the only result of this congress, focused exclusively on Europe, would be the preparation of the list for the European Parliament, an institution in which he does not believe and for which he has come to ask, and therein lies the irony, its dissolution.

The list was closed this Saturday. The maximum number was 30 people and, to enter the competition, the congressmen established, among other requirements, a minimum of five years of professional activity outside of politics, a minimum time of affiliation to the party to avoid potential careerists and good English skills. After a seven-minute presentation speech, the candidates had to submit to two questions. One of the AfD's mantras is transparency..

The election of the head of the list for the elections that will allow the AfD to fight, from within, against some community institutions that they consider “undemocratic” and “pernicious”, was less painful. Four candidates stood but the balance was clearly tipped towards Maximilian Krah MEP. And there have been no surprises. krah is one of them. He has published a book entitled Politics from the Right through Götz Kubitschek's ultra-right publishing house Antaios, which is monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.. The first edition is already sold out.. Krah appears in several places in reports from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which examine how dangerous the AfD is for democracy.

As a lawyer, he represented protesters from the Pegida anti-immigration movement and the group of men who tied an Iraqi refugee to a tree, but that, he rightly asserts, is guaranteeing the right to defense guaranteed to all by the Constitution.

His ideas breed quotes that equate EU membership with “a woman who gets beat up at home, but she doesn't leave voluntarily; usually you have to help her, show her an alternative”. On social platforms, he explains on video to a target group of young men that they should not watch porn and should not vote green. “Real men are on the right,” he says.

All this is not a disadvantage, but rather an advantage for a career in the AfD. So much so that analysts consider Krah a threat to Chrupalla. With his support for his candidacy, the co-chair confirms that he prefers to have him in Brussels and Strasbourg rather than in Berlin.

hard to control

But Krah, in addition to being charismatic and skilled, is a difficult character to control.. “Attackable” is the word most used by friends and enemies when they talk about him. The list of his attack points is long. He was suspended for three months from the Identity and Democracy (ID) fraction, of which the AfD is a part in the European Parliament, due to accusations of fraud. In 2022, he was punished with the same sanction for supporting Éric Zemmour in the French electoral campaign instead of Marine Le Pen, who belongs to ID, founded in 2019. Its leader is Marco Zanni, from the Italian xenophobic party Liga. Also members of this group are the Austrian FPÖ, the Belgian Vlaams Belang, the Czech Freedom and Direct Democracy Party, the Danish People's Party and the Estonian Conservative People's Party.

African leaders on Friday pressured the Russian president to return to the agreement on the export of Ukrainian grain that Moscow broke last week.. They also asked him to take into account their joint initiative to make peace with Ukraine.. African leaders attending the Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg avoided directly criticizing Moscow, but their interventions on the second day of a summit served as an indication of deep African concern about the consequences of the war in the countries in development, especially with regard to food prices due to the drop in supply.

Until Moscow refused to renew it last week, the Black Sea grain deal had allowed Ukraine to export grain from its seaports despite the war.. Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al Sisi urged Russia to return to that commitment.. Egypt is a key buyer of grain exported via the Black Sea route.. Al Sisi noted that it was “essential to reach an agreement” to revive the deal.

Putin responded by pulling from the familiar argument: saying that the increase in world food prices is the result of mistakes in Western policy that go back long before the war.

Since withdrawing from the agreement, Russia has repeatedly bombarded Ukraine's ports and grain warehouses..

On Thursday, Russia promised to deliver free grain to six of the countries attending the summit.. “It's basically propaganda, to show that you care about their needs and give credibility to their reasons for getting out of the grain deal,” says Ivan U.. Klyszcz, Researcher at the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute, in an interview with EL MUNDO.

This specialist in Russian foreign policy has spread the term “messianic multipolarity” to talk about the message that Moscow is trying to convey to the so-called 'global south': “It is that we live in an unfair world where the West tries to keep the poor poor, and Russia tries to get the rest to unite against this world order”.

Putin received the plan coldly when a group of African presidents presented it to him last month.. Instead, in remarks on Friday, he said Moscow respected the African peace proposal on Ukraine and was studying it carefully..

“New Realities”

An agreement now has little chance. Russia has long said it is open to talks but must reckon with “new realities” on the ground, where it controls nearly a fifth of Ukraine's territory after 17 months of war and has annexed it as its own. four Ukrainian regions as their own.

Although this summit has been devalued in terms of assistance because of the war, African countries have approached St. Petersburg interested in “grain, fertilizer and fuel” from Russia. On the political level, African countries “also seek to attract the attention of the West, because without sharing the very pessimistic Russian vision, they show that they can go with the other party,” recalls Klyszcz..

African Union Chairman Azali Assoumani said Putin's grain offer is not enough, and “a ceasefire is needed in Ukraine”. During the summit, Russia announced that 90% of the pending issues on the African debt had been resolved and blamed the invaded country for not wanting to talk.

Russia wants to pose as Africa's “big friend,” even though its investment is minimal and its trade with the continent has stagnated. But even so, Moscow insists on increasing its projection over that part of the world for various reasons. “A broad and deep relationship helps Russia to show that it is a power, and at the same time Moscow wants to undermine the presence of the West and Ukraine in the world,” said Klyszcz, who collaborates with the International Center for Defense and Security (ICDS). Africa is also useful for “sanctions evasion”, for example providing an outlet for the 'spoils of war' of Evgeni Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries in Africa. “We are basically talking about gold and diamonds, which can be hidden through 'hubs' that have a more favorable legal environment, such as Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, and then use those dollars to buy chips and components in China or any other country.”