Month: April 2019

A French skier who went missing more than 60 years ago has finally been identified after details of a probe into his disappearance were posted on social media, Italian police said on Sunday.

Human remains and ski equipment were found in 2005 more than 10,000 feet up the Cime Bianche in the Valtournenche valley of the Aosta region near the Swiss border in northern Italy.

The man appeared to be well off given his top-line wooden skis, said Marinella Laporta of the forensic police unit in Turin.

Investigators estimated the man to have been about five foot nine inches tall and aged about 30, with his death likely occurring in the spring.

They also found glasses, a watch and pieces of his shirt with embroidered initials.

Having made no progress with identification, the Aosta valley prosecutor decided in late June to post the investigation’s findings on his Facebook page, asking readers to spread the information, especially in France and Switzerland.

Frenchwoman Emma Nassem heard the story on the radio and said the missing man could be her uncle, Henri Le Masne, born in 1919, who went missing after skiing in a storm near the Matterhorn in 1954.

Roger Le Masne, Henri’s younger brother and now 94, also came forward.

"I am the brother of Henri Le Masne … who is likely the skier who disappeared 64 years ago. He was a bachelor and quite independent. He worked in the finance ministry in Paris," Roger said in an email made available by the police.

Roger said he had gone to the hotel where his brother had taken a room for two weeks and where he found some personal effects, including money, after he went missing on March 26, 1954.

The police said a photograph provided by the family showed glasses matching those found by the investigators.

A subsequent DNA test confirmed the identification, they said.

A man arrested in New Mexico last week on child abuse and abduction charges was training one of the 11 children at his remote desert encampment to carry out a school shooting, prosecutors have claimed.

Siraj Wahhaj, 39, appeared before a magistrate in Taos, New Mexico, on Wednesday.

He was arrested on Friday after police, searching for his missing four-year-old son Abdul-Ghani, raided the compound and found 11 starving, filthy children with five adults.

Wahhaj and the four others – his wife Jany Leveille, 38, his sisters, Subhannah, 35, and Hujrah, 38, and Subhannah’s husband Lucas Morten – were charged with 11 counts of child abuse.

Sheriff Jerry Hogrefe, who arrested Wahhaj and his associates after a day-long armed standoff, said his men planned "a tactical approach for our own safety, because we had learned the occupants were most likely heavily armed and considered extremist of the Muslim belief."

The remains of a young boy, believed to be Wahhaj’s missing son, was found buried on the property, Mr Hogrefe said on Tuesday.

On Wednesday it emerged that one of the 11 children taken into care had, according to prosecutors, told their foster parents that Wahhaj trained them to carry out a school shooting.

The child was allegedly taught to fire an assault rifle, in readiness for the mission. 

Tim Hasson, a prosecutor with the district court in Taos, requested that Wahhaj, son of a prominent Brooklyn imam, remain in custody and that his case be moved to the district court. His office has also filed motions to hold the other four defendants.

The saga began in December, when Wahhaj told the boy’s mother he was taking their severely disabled child, unable to walk, to the park.

He never returned to their home in Georgia, and the boy’s mother reported it to the police, saying Wahhaj intended to perform an “exorcism” on his son because Abdul-Ghani was “possessed by the Devil.”

She later said that “exorcism” was a mistranslation, and that Wahhaj simply wanted to pray for his son.

New Mexico authorities had long suspected the father and son might be at the compound after learning about the abduction in May, said Mr Hogrefe.

But there was not enough evidence for a search warrant, and surveillance of the property did not identify the pair there. That changed on Thursday, when they received a note from inside the compound saying they were starving and thirsty.

Mr Hogrefe said his men found Wahhaj in a "partly buried camper trailer" with two women and several of the children. 

Wahhaj refused to come out with his hands up, and when investigators opened the door, they found Wahhaj "was armed with a loaded revolver in his pocket," and was "wearing a belt with five loaded 30-round AR15 magazines in pouches on the belt." 

Next to Wahhaj was a loaded AR15, according to Mr Hogrefe’s affidavit. 

Wahhaj refused to give his name or identify anyone with him. He declined to say anything about his son Abdul’s whereabouts, according to the court document. 

Investigators found a 100-foot tunnel on the north side of the buried trailer, about three feet in diameter with two dugout "pockets" containing bedding, Mr Hogrefe said.

Another enclosure made of straw and tires housed a makeshift toilet. There was no running water.  

On the compound was a powerful Marlin 30-30 rifle with a scope, other guns, ammunition, a laptop, camcorder, and a Penguin child’s nebulizer used to turn medicine into mist.

Morten was arrested at the front of the property and initially charged with harbouring a fugitive. The child abuse charges were added later.

"The living conditions, health and wellbeing of the children were deemed deplorable,” said Mr Hogrefe.

“They had no clean water, food or electricity; dirty clothing, poor hygiene, and had not eaten or taken nutrition in what was believed to be days."

Three Russian journalists have been gunned down in Central African Republic while investigating mercenaries linked to a shadowy figure known as “Putin’s chef”. 

Legendary war correspondent Orkhan Dzhemal, 51, award-winning filmmaker Alexander Rastorguyev, 47, and cameraman Kirill Radchenko, 33, were killed on Monday night when their vehicle was ambushed in the war-torn country. 

Government authorities suspect members of Seleka, a loose group of mostly Muslim rebels that controls more than half of CAR, according to Russian and CAR state media. 

Citing the driver, who survived, local officials claimed the journalists were killed by Arabic-speaking “turbaned gunmen” after resisting the the theft of their vehicle. 

They had ventured past a government checkpoint into rebel-controlled territory despite warnings from soldiers, according to the Russian foreign ministry. 

A local website published a photograph showing the bloodied corpses of two of the men in the back of a truck. 

One of the men’s editors said he had been suspicious of their driver after they were shaken down for a bribe by police. Besides film equipment, the group was carrying $8,500 in cash.

But some in Russia have raised concerns that their killing could be connected to the sensitive topic of their report.

In April, another journalist who had reported on the same mercenaries died in a fall from his balcony in Yekaterinburg a day after he said he saw armed men in his stairwell.

The trio was making a film for TsUR, an investigative media centre funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch who was imprisoned for a decade after publicly disagreeing with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. 

“I will make efforts to identify those responsible,” Mr Khodorkovsky, who now lives outside Russia, wrote on social media, giving no further details on what he intended to do.

Their topic was the Wagner mercenary group that was hit with US airstrikes earlier this year while attacking an oilfield in Syria, where it served as “shock troops” for Mr Putin’s ally Bashar Assad.

Dmitry Utkin, who was sanctioned by the United States as Wagner’s leader, has been photographed with Mr Putin and was employed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a catering magnate known as “Putin’s chef” for serving the president during state dinners. 

A US grand jury indicted Mr Prigozhin in February for running a Russian Internet troll factory that tried to turn voters against Hillary Clinton.

A foreign ministry spokeswoman denied that the journalists’ death was connected to their investigation of Wagner. Russian state media have avoided mentioning the group in reporting the incident.

Russia has taken on an official role in CAR since December last year, when it was authorised by the UN to provide government forces with weapons and training. It said it has deployed “five military and 170 civilian instructors to train CAR soldiers”.

But researchers from the Moscow-based Conflict Intelligence Team and Transparency International have raised suspicions that Wagner was guarding diamond mines in rebel territory.

In April, locals blocked a Russian-registered Cessna airplane the government said was carrying Russian military advisers from taking off in rebel-held Kaga Bandoro, which is near diamond deposits. A CAR official said Russian advisers had been there for peace negotiations with rebels.

Some reports held that the three journalists had also travelled to Kaga Bandoro. 

TsUR said they had been trying to set up filming at the Ndassima gold fields, which Russia is reportedly involved in securing.

The foreign ministry said Russia and the CAR began joint “exploratory mining concessions” this year, but did not specify where. 

Two Russia-linked mining companies were registered following the agreement to develop CAR’s natural resources with Russia, according to Transparency International.

The NGO’s deputy director Ilya Shumanov said one of the companies was owned by a security firm, which he called “further evidence that the deployment of private military companies and Russians’ entry into the the CAR mining sector are of a piece”.

In Syria, a company linked to the Wagner group had a deal with the government to receive 25 per cent of the profits from oil and gas fields its contractors could capture, according to a contract seen by AP and Russian media. 

The three Russian correspondents had previously been turned away from Wagner troops’ reported headquarters in Jean-Bedel Bokassa’s palace in Berengo, where the late dictator was accused of feeding enemies to lions and crocodiles or eating their flesh himself. 

Russia has been trying to return some of its Soviet-era influence in Africa, including through arms deals like the $1bn sale of Su-24 fighter jets to Sudan.

CAR president Faustin-Archange Touadéra met Mr Putin at an economic gathering in St Petersburg in May.

Friends and well-wishers have been laying flowers in memory of the slain journalists at a monument to frontline reporters in downtown Moscow. Their bodies will be brought back to Russia on Friday.

Mr Rastorguyev had made films about life in the Russian provinces as well as Moscow’s wars in Ukraine and Chechnya. 

Mr Radchenko had covered the Ukrainian conflict and also Russia’s military intervention in Syria. 

Mr Dzhemal, the son of a well-known Muslim activist, had reported from these conflicts as well as those in Georgia, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq.

In an obituary, author Mikhail Zygar, a former colleague at Russian Newsweek and TV Rain, wrote that “only the heroes of children’s books are as honest and foolhardy” as the late war correspondent was. 

 

An Egyptian zoo appears to have painted black stripes on a donkey to try to pass it off as a zebra. 

The animal at Cairo’s International Garden has long pointy ears and a small frame like a donkey. 

It also has black stripes across its body but one of the stripes on its face appears to have been smudged.

The case of the ‘almost zebra’ came to light after Mahmoud Sarhan, an Egyptian student, posted photographs online after a visit to the zoo. 

The pictures quickly went viral and animal experts rushed in to point out that the animal looked nothing like a zebra. 

As well as the difference in size and ears, zebras have black snouts. The animal in the photograph has a grey snout.

There appeared to be at least two painted animals in the enclosure. 

The zoo has denied that it painted a donkey and insists that the animal is real. The zoo opened earlier this year in a park to the east of downtown Cairo. 

This is not the first time that zookeepers appear to have tried to pass off donkeys as zebras. 

A zoo in Gaza painted two donkeys because it was too difficult to bring actual zebras past the Israeli and Egyptian blockade. 

But the zoo owner made no secret of the paint job, saying he did it to try to show children what life was like beyond Gaza’s borders.

When the 12 young members of the Wild Boars football team emerged from the snaking caverns of Tham Luang, northern Thailand, the first concern was over their physical condition.

The boys, aged between 11 and 17, had been trapped with their 25-year-old coach underground for 18 days by monsoon rains, before they were sedated and led to safety in a dramatic rescue by specialist divers.

But as she watched the events unfold, Rebecca Sheriff, a British psychiatrist specialising in childhood mental health, knew the psychological effects of their ordeal could be more long-lasting. “There was almost a public response which was ‘Oh my goodness, these kids are going to be messed up, something has to be done’, and I was nervous that the services and the powers that be would take that on," she said.

"They knew that debriefing is not the thing to do but weren’t quite sure how to go about all the things they needed to do."

Ms Sheriff, who trained at Balliol College in Oxford and who holds dual British and Australian citizenship, now lives with her family in Bangkok where she provides clinical supervision to doctors at the King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital. When the boys first emerged from the cave, she volunteered her services to the deputy mental health minister.

Ms Sheriff advised a policy of "watchful waiting": find out about vulnerabilities and allow the traumatised boys to rely on their established social networks.

.html-embed.component .quote.component{margin-left:0}.html-embed.component .quote.component .component-content{margin-right:16px}.quote__source,.quote__author{white-space:normal}@media only screen and (min-width:730px){.html-embed.component .quote.component{margin-left:-60.83px}.html-embed.component .quote.component .quote__content:before{margin-left:-12px;padding-right:1px}}@media only screen and (min-width:1008px){.html-embed.component .quote.component{margin-left:-82.33px}}

“When bad things happen, people say ‘oh, you should talk things through’, almost like it’s this Freudian idea that psychological pus gets discharged if we talk about it,” she said.

“But actually we know from research that that is one of the most harmful things you can do because it runs the risk of re-traumatising them. For some people it will be helpful to talk, but what we have found from military studies is that you are better off talking to your friends, your family and your normal support networks than to a psychiatrist or health-care professional – why would you want to talk to some stranger?”

Thai cave rescue | Read more

The boys were kept in a carefully controlled hospital environment, with their loved ones allowed to see them through protective glass. The children were also protected from media intrusion, with a managed press conference arranged a week after the boys emerged. “The kids were taking a lot of comfort from each other, obviously having been through it together and having been football team-mates and having that camaraderie," said Ms Sheriff.

She said reassuring the parents was another crucial step in the process. “Research in Australia on the traumatic after-effects of bushfires has shown that one of the biggest predictors of children not coping well with trauma is having parents who have not coped well," she said.

“There’s a natural and normal response which is that if your child has been through a trauma to protect them, but what was found there was that if the parent continues to be anxious and over-protective, and almost restrict that child from having a normal adolescence, then you have a more severe long-term mental health effect, not just post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but depression and anxiety as well.

"So a lot of the watchful waiting is about reassurance, making sure people know services are there if they need them.”

The group were released from hospital after a week and have recently returned to school, after all but one of them spent nine days in a Buddhist monastery, a tradition for Thai males who experience adversity. Three young players and the coach, Ekapol Chanthawong, have also since been granted Thai citizenship, having previously been stateless.

Throughout their time in the cave the coach tried to get the boys to use meditation in an attempt to remain calm and use less oxygen, which Ms Sheriff said was a positive distraction. “A lot of the techniques from meditation are similar to mindfulness and hypnosis,” she says, “so you wonder if it’s actually pretty protective”.

Of the 13 people and their families involved, Sheriff said it was likely only one or two could require professional treatment in future.

Reflecting on the cave rescue, Ms Sheriff had nothing but praise for the way the Thai authorities grappled with the unprecedented problem. “There was a lot to admire about how amazingly the Thais coordinated a huge international effort to get the kids out of the cave and of people offering up their help. The way the Thai authorities weren’t overwhelmed and were able to coordinate a response was incredibly positive.”

Of her own involvement, she was happy just to be available. “You’ve got to take your pride out of it,” she said. “Offer what you think might be helpful, see what they take up and walk away.”

Zimbabwe’s leading opposition candidate accused the country’s electoral authorities of trying to suppress voter turnout at presidential elections on Monday, raising fears of a disputed outcome to the historic poll. 

Millions of Zimbabweans turned out to vote in the country’s first presidential, parliamentary, and local government elections since dictator Robert Mugabe was ousted in a military coup in November.

The outcome will decide whether Emmerson Mnangagwa, a 75-year-old former ally of Mr Mugabe, or Nelson Chamisa, a 40-year-old lawyer and preacher leading the opposition MDC alliance, will be the country’s next president. 

The only poll released in the run up to the vote showed Mr Mnangagwa leading Mr Chamisa by just 3 per cent, and the results, which must be announced by Saturday, are expected to be tight. 

Mr Chamisa, who has repeatedly accused the country’s electoral authorities of colluding with Mr Mnangagwa and his Zanu-PF Party, claimed queues at some polling stations in Harare on Monday were a deliberate attempt to reduce turnout in traditional strongholds of the opposition MDC Alliance.

 "There seems to be a deliberate attempt to suppress and frustrate the Urban vote,” Mr Chamisa wrote on Twitter.

“Good turn out but the people’s will being negated & undetermined due to these deliberate & unnecessary delays.”

There were queues of up to one hour at Harare polling stations visited by the Telegraph. 

Polling stations are technically obliged to remain open until all those still in line at 7PM, when polling closes, have voted.

EU chief observer Elmar Brok said many voters left voting queues in frustration at long delays but that it was as yet unclear whether those delays were deliberate or down to poor management.  

“In some cases it (voting) works very smoothly but in others we see that it is totally disorganized and that people become angry, people leave,” Mr Brok told reporters in Harare. 

Profile | Emmerson Mnangagwa

Voting generally went smoothly and there was no violence reported. 

However, several voters said that memories of 2008, when Mr Mugabe unleashed thugs to terrorise MDC activists and supporters, still loomed large. 

“I’m glad we voted. We really badly need change,” said a 61-year-old man who cast his ballot in the Harare suburb of Newlands. 

“But I don’t want to give you my name or say who I voted for because we don’t know what the repercussions will be afterwards. It would be easy to track me down.”

Zanu-PF have ruled Zimbabwe for 38 years and Mr Mnangagwa’s near total dominance in the media makes him the front runner in the election. 

He has sought to attract former opposition voters by publicly breaking with Mr Mugabe and promising a “New Dispensation” of democratic and economic reforms.

However, Mr Chamisa has made  significant inroads into former Zanu PF strongholds in rural areas and has attracted large crowds at his rallies.

He has said he is certain of victory and that any other outcome could only be the result of vote-rigging by Zanu-PF. 

“I am moderately bullish,” said Terence Mukupe, the Zanu-PF candidate for the constituency of Harare East, before casting his vote. 

“The MDC vote is split, and the business community, the white community, and the middle classes who used to vote for the opposition have largely switched to ED,” he said, using Mr Mnangagwa’s initials.

But as polls closed on Monday evening there were signs that Mr Chamisa had made inroads into Zanu-PF’s own traditional strongholds. 

One 71-year-old grandmother from a village 40 miles north of Harare said she did not vote for Zanu-PF for the first time because she said she now felt “safe” to support the opposition. 

Africa's tarnished jewel: how four decades of Robert Mugabe left Zimbabwe's economy reeling

“We….my friends from church like sweet things, and so some of us grandmothers voted for Chamisa,” she laughed. 

The election has been dominated by the legacy of Mr Mugabe, with both candidates promising a break with the stagnation and political violence of his rule. 

The former dictator, 94, made a surprise intervention on the eve of the election, saying he would not vote for his own Zanu-PF party and hinting that he would back Mr Chamisa instead. 

He was cheered when he showed up to vote at his polling station in Highfield, a township on the southern outskirts of Harare, with his wife Grace. 

Mrs Mugabe was yesterday stripped of her diplomatic immunity by a court in South Africa, where she is facing allegations of assaulting model Gabriella Engels’ with an electrical cord in when she discovered her in the company of her sons in a luxury Johannesburg hotel. 

Another observer in Harare who was in contact with groups in other parts of the country, said there had been isolated incidents of voter intimidation. 

“So far, and it is too early to make conclusions, there does not seem to have been any pattern or targeted bias. We have heard from colleagues in one or two rural areas – and this needs to be checked – there were some instances of intimidation, but not systemic or as ugly as in the past.”

Mr Mnangagwa called the election a "beautiful expression of freedom and democracy" and called on candidates not to call the result before the electoral commission announces the official outcome.  

"In our millions, we voted in the spirit of tolerance, mutual respect & peace," he wrote on Twitter after polling closed.

"Let us remember that no matter which way we voted, we are all brothers and sisters, and this land belongs to us all."

Sixty-four years after her death, the personal life and politics of Frida Kahlo have come under scrutiny in Hungary.

A right-wing pro-government newspaper has criticised a hugely popular exhibition of her work at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest for "promoting communism".

The criticism comes as part of a wider national debate on culture and cultural policy since nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban won a third consecutive mandate in April.

Mr Orban’s supporters and pro-government journalists have argued in the past weeks that after Orban won another strong mandate, it was now time for a shift in culture towards conservative values to end what they call a dominance of leftist-liberal artists.

In a July 14 article entitled "This is the way communism is promoted using state money", the Kahlo exhibition was listed in the right-wing newspaper Magyar Idok along with some other galleries, artists and exhibitions.

"You won’t believe it but Trotsky has emerged in Budapest again, this time from Frida Kahlo’s bed," the newspaper wrote, referring to her affair with Leon Trotsky, a key figure in the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, during his later exile in Mexico. Trotsky was assassinated in 1940.

Kahlo was affiliated with the communist Party of Mexico and is also said to have decorated the head of her bed with images of communist leaders Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, according to Mexico’s Museo Frida Kahlo.

The Kahlo exhibition, the international musical Billy Elliot and a string of gallery shows have found themselves under fire in a series of articles in the newspaper.

The paper added there was "no aesthetic problem" with the exhibition of the "Mexican communist painter", which is drawing up to 3,000 visitors a day.

The National Gallery declined comment. Kahlo has become one of the twentieth century’s most famous artists in the decades since her death, and her work draws huge interest.

The Budapest exhibition of paintings coincides with a Kahlo exhibition at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum that focuses on her life story through personal artefacts.

New era

Galvanising the debate about cultural policy, Mr Orban said on July 28 major changes lie ahead in this field and his third election victory was "nothing short of a mandate to build a new era."

"An era is determined by cultural trends, collective beliefs and social customs. This is now the task we are faced with: we must embed the political system in a cultural era," Mr Orban told hundreds of supporters in a landmark speech.

A government spokesman declined comment when asked about the looming changes.

Since Mr Orban was first elected in 2010, his Fidesz party has rewritten Hungary’s constitution, gained control of state media, and businessmen close to Mr Orban and Fidesz have built empires.

Mr Orban has successfully challenged western liberal taboos, winning the 2018 election with a strong anti-immigration campaign and by focusing on the importance of national pride and unity, and a "strong Hungary".

A group of around 60 artists and art historians signed a manifesto rejecting the listing of artists in Magyar Idok saying the attacks were unfounded.

In June, Magyar Idok also published an article by a guest commentator who accused the musical Billy Elliot in the Hungarian State Opera of spreading homosexual propaganda among its young audience. Billy Elliot has been on the programme for two years, with over 100,000 viewers so far.

The State Opera cancelled 15 of 44 performances planned for June-July.

It said in a statement on its website the performances had not been cancelled because of the press controversy. But it noted people had lost interest in seeing the show following the coverage.

Tamas Fricz, a right-wing political analyst who has helped organise mass rallies for Orban, said the aim was "not to destroy liberal culture" but to adjust the system to reflect the right-wing conservative political dominance, while also preserving the values of liberal arts.

"The autonomy of individual institutions should be preserved but I think the government … has the right to firmly and consciously favour and support conservative thinking, artists, works of culture," Fricz said.

One way would be to channel more money to historical movies showing the grand chapters of Hungarian history, he said.

"A conservative culture must build itself … which would show the historical strength of the Hungarian nation," he said.

Six years after his guerrilla movement swept away a brutal dictatorship, Daniel Ortega stood on stage in his army fatigues and characteristic thick square glasses, vindicated as he celebrated his election as president of Nicaragua.

He held his clenched fist high on the podium in front of adoring crowds as the looming figure of Fidel Castro clapped approvingly behind. Socialism had prevailed. The revolution was underway. And all under the noses of the US at the height of the Cold War.

Crowds returned to Managua’s main plaza in July this year as Mr Ortega marked the 39th anniversary of his revolution. Whether he will see its 40th as President, however, is in serious doubt.

Nearly 100 days of protests…