British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson will meet with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in London on Thursday to discuss issues including Hurricane Irma, North Korea and Libya, his office said.

Johnson, who this week visited the British territories of Anguilla and the British Virgin islands to see the devastation caused by Irma, will discuss the international response with Tillerson and French Political Director Nicolas de Riviere.

“I’ve seen firsthand the devastation Hurricane Irma has caused people in the Caribbean. Close coordination with our allies is vital for both the short-term and long-term recovery efforts,” Johnson said in a statement ahead of the meeting.

The three will also discuss the situation in North Korea, which carried out its sixth and largest nuclear test earlier this month.

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to boost sanctions on North Korea on Monday, but U.S. President Donald Trump has said they were a small step and nothing compared to what would have to happen to deal with the country’s nuclear program.

Johnson will also host a meeting on Libya, attended by Tillerson and other international representatives including Italian Foreign Minister Angelion Alfano, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry and U.N. Libya envoy Ghassan Salame.
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Spain’s state prosecutor has summoned more than 700 Catalan mayors who have backed an independence referendum, in an escalation of Madrid’s efforts to block the vote that it has declared illegal.

Officials engaging in any preparations for the vote could be charged with civil disobedience, abuse of office and misuse of public funds, the prosecutor said in a letter delivered to local authorities on Wednesday.

If the mayors do not answer the summons, police should arrest them, it added.

One mayor said the legal move was unprecedented.

“We don’t think any European country has ever tried to make more than 700 mayors testify,” said Neus Lloveras, mayor of Vilanova i la Geltru near Barcelona, head of the Association of Municipalities for Independence (AMI).

“We have nothing to hide. When we have to go and testify, we will say everything we have been saying for days, that we owe it to our people to keep working to make sure they can freely express themselves at the ballot box,” he told reporters.

But the small, anti-capitalist CUP group, which governs 19 Catalan municipalities, said it would not answer the summons, and called on other political forces to do the same.

Catalonia’s regional parliament passed laws last week to prepare for a referendum on Oct. 1. Spain’s Constitutional Court suspended the vote after Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy challenged it in the courts.

Judges are now considering whether the legislation contravenes Spain’s constitution, which states that the country is indivisible.

So far, 712 of a total 948 municipal leaders have said they would allow public spaces to be used for the referendum, according to AMI.

The mayor of Barcelona — the region’s most populous area — has yet to take a definitive position, and has asked for reassurances that civil servants involved in the process will not risk losing their jobs.

Website stops working

The website set up by the Catalan government to give information on the vote, referendum.cat, stopped working Wednesday evening, with Spanish media reporting that the regional prosecutor had ordered all websites promoting the referendum to be shut down.

Civil Guard police confirmed that they had gone to deliver a warrant at the website’s offices, but declined to say if judges had ordered it to be closed.

Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont quickly posted two new web addresses on Twitter linking to a page with information on the referendum.

Polls show a minority of Catalans want self-rule, although a majority want the chance to vote on the issue. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Barcelona this week to show support for independence.

In a separate order, the Constitutional Court told regional government officials on Wednesday they had 48 hours to show how they were preventing the vote from going ahead.
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Neutral Sweden has launched its biggest war games in two decades with support from NATO countries, drilling 19,000 troops after years of spending cuts that have left the country fearful of Russia’s growing military strength.

On the eve of Russia’s biggest maneuvers since 2013, which NATO says will be greater than the 13,000 troops Moscow says are involved, Sweden will simulate an attack from the east on the Baltic island of Gotland, near the Swedish mainland.

“The security situation has taken a turn for the worse,” Micael Byden, the commander of the Swedish Armed Forces, said during a presentation of the three-week-long exercise.

Sweden, like the Baltics, Poland and much of the West, has been deeply troubled by Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula Crimea and its support for rebels in eastern Ukraine.

“Russia is the country that affects security in Europe right now with its actions — the annexation of the Crimea and continued battles in eastern Ukraine — so it is clear that we are watching very closely what Russia is doing,” Byden said.

​​Sweden brings back conscription

Around 1,500 troops from the United States, France, Norway and other NATO allies are taking part in the exercise dubbed Aurora.

Non-NATO member Sweden has decided to beef up its military after having let spending drop from over 2 percent of economic output in the early 1990s to around 1 percent, and is re-introducing conscription.

The armed forces, which at one point could mobilize more than 600,000, stand at just 20,000, with 22,000 more Home Guard volunteers.

NATO generals say the Aurora exercise is not a response to Russian exercises that start on Thursday.

But Byden, speaking as U.S. and French forces displayed mobile surface-to-air missile systems to be deployed during the exercise, stressed the importance of NATO for Sweden.

“We are a sovereign country that takes care of and is responsible for our safety. We do this together with others, ready to both support and receive help,” he said.

New role for US troops

The United States shipped vehicles by sea from Germany, while France brought others by train. They are to be moved via a classified route to Sweden’s east coast for the exercise where U.S. attack helicopters will play the enemy during Aurora.

The government is determined to stick to the country’s formal neutrality. Sweden has not fought a war since it clashed with Norway in 1814.

But like its non-NATO neighbor Finland, Sweden has been drawing closer to NATO, allowing closer cooperation with alliance troops, with a view to working together in the event of an armed conflict.

 
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Former governor of Odessa and onetime Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili was served Tuesday with a legal notice to appear before a Ukrainian court to explain why he broke through a cordon of police and border guards to enter the country from Poland.

The legal move adds more drama to a weeks-long political standoff roiling Ukraine between the country’s president, Petro Poroshenko, and his onetime ally, Saakashvili, who was stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship in July by the government.

Saakashvili, who claims Poroshenko revoked his citizenship illegally after the two fell out, has now sworn to rally opposition parties behind him. He and a rowdy group of supporters, that included five Ukrainian lawmakers, forced their way through the Polish-Ukrainian border Sunday after the authorities tried to deny him entry at other crossing points, first arguing his documents were invalid, and then halting a train he was traveling because of an alleged bomb threat.

After breaking through a police cordon at the Shehyni border crossing, Saakashvili made his way to a hotel in nearby Lviv and — with opposition leaders Yulia Tymoshenko, a former Ukrainian prime minister, and Andriy Sadovy, looking on — he said he planned to rally Poroshenko’s political opponents and help them unseat the Ukrainian president over failed promises to reform the country.

Saakashvili says he is not seeking the presidency for himself, but wants to see his former friend, Poroshenko, voted out of office at the next elections, scheduled in 2019.

“I am fighting against rampant corruption, against the fact that oligarchs are in full control of Ukraine again, against the fact that Maidan has been betrayed,” Saakashvili said at a press conference, referring to the anti-government protests that saw pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych ousted from power.

In a country that, in the past four years, has witnessed high political drama, invasion and war — from the ouster of a Moscow-backed president by popular street protests to the Russian annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin fomenting of conflict and separatism in the Donbas in the east of the country — Sunday’s circus-like incident may seem minor by comparison.

But the clash between the friends-turned-foes is adding to a sense of alarm in the country and undermines Poroshenko’s argument that Ukraine is slowly but surely stabilizing and establishing the rule of law, according to analysts.

Poroshenko has said Saakashvili will have to face a court for his illegal crossing.

“This is a state security issue,” the Ukrainian president said in a video address Monday. “I don’t care who breaks the state border: fighters in the east, or politicians in the west. There should be direct legal accountability.”

From friends to foes

Saakashvili received Ukrainian citizenship in 2015 from Poroshenko when the president made him governor of Odessa, hoping he would help with the reform of Ukraine following the Maidan uprising. But the hard-charging Saakashvili and Poroshenko, who were old friends from university days, soon fell out.

The Georgian accused Poroshenko of abetting corruption; Poroshenko said Saakashvili had failed to deliver any real change as governor and alleged he had lied on his citizenship application form by leaving out information about possible corruption charges he could face in his native country of Georgia. Revoking citizenship rendered Saakashvili stateless, as Georgia revoked his Georgian citizenship when he became a Ukrainian.

“I think Poroshenko made a mistake inviting Saakashvili in the first place,” said political scientist Oleksy Garan, a professor at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. “He was invited because he was viewed as a successful reformer in Georgia. But he is a man of PR stunts. He didn’t perform his job well and he appeared very destabilizing and the two men clashed badly.”

Like many legal experts, Garan says the revocation of Saakashvili’s citizenship may be justified legally. “But from the moral and political point of view, it looked bad. The corruption investigation in Georgia was known about and everyone just turned a blind eye to it before Poroshenko used it to get rid of him,” he said. “Saakashvili’s antics now are playing into Russian hands — Moscow is now saying this shows how Ukraine is a failed state and chaotic.”

Saakashvili’s own popularity ratings in the polls are low, with under two percent of Ukrainians viewing him favorably. But populist sentiments he is beginning to trigger could be used by other opposition leaders and used against Poroshenko, analysts warn.

Saakashvili’s supporters say they believe the court papers were served on him in Lviv in an effort to prevent the former Georgian president from traveling to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, something he has threatened to do. On Tuesday, Saakashvili said he would tour Ukraine’s biggest cities to rally support before heading to Kyiv.

He argues he committed no offense by crossing into Ukraine, claiming he was carried by his supporters through the checkpoint and that can’t be considered an “illegal breakthrough.” Saakashvili also claims he has applied for asylum, and asylum applicants are exempt from penalties for border crossings with invalid papers.
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Italy’s lower house of parliament approved on Tuesday a bill aimed at curbing fascist propaganda, more than 70 years after the death of wartime dictator Benito Mussolini.

The draft law, proposed by the ruling Democratic Party (PD), follows a politically charged summer, with human rights groups warning of growing racism in Italy in the face of mass immigration across the Mediterranean from Africa.

Under existing laws, pro-fascist propaganda is only penalized if it is seen to be part of an effort to revive the old Fascist Party. The new bill raises the stakes by outlawing the stiff-armed Roman salute, as well as the distribution of fascist or Nazi party imagery and gadgets.

Offenders risk up to two years in jail, with sentences raised by a further eight months if the fascist imagery is distributed over the internet. The legislation now passes to the upper house Senate for further approval.

Opposition parties, including the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement and the center-right Forza Italia (Go Italy) party of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, said the bill posed a threat to freedom of speech.

But Emanuele Fiano, a PD lawmaker who drew up the legislation, dismissed such concerns.

“This bill does not attack personal freedoms but will act as a brake on neo-fascist regurgitation and a return of extreme right-wing ideology,” he said.

Mussolini ruled over Italy from 1922 until 1943. He took Italy into World War II on Adolf Hitler’s side and passed race laws under which thousands of Jews were persecuted.

Italy was routed by the allied forces and Mussolini, also known as “Il Duce,” was executed in 1945.

Anti-immigrant sentiment

Mussolini is still admired by a core of supporters on the far-right, and posters using fascist imagery regularly appear on city billboards — most recently in a stylized picture of a white woman being assaulted by a muscular black man.

“Defend her from the new invaders,” said the poster, put up by a fringe party called Forza Nuova (New Force). The group was referring to a high-profile rape case last month when four foreigners were accused of gang-raping a Polish tourist.

More than 600,000 migrants, mainly Africans, have come to Italy over the past four years, boosting anti-immigration sentiment in the country and pushing up support for rightist and far-right parties that demand rigid border controls.

Given the political climate, the ruling PD was forced on Tuesday to delay its push to approve a contested law that would grant citizenship to the children of immigrants.

Opposition parties said the law would encourage migrants to try to come to Italy; they claimed victory when the PD announced it was dropping the bill from the Senate schedule this month.

“To approve this bill we need a majority, but we don’t have one right now in the Senate,” said Luigi Zanda, head of the PD in the upper house of parliament.
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Islamic State flags are not flying in Bosnia, Prime Minister Denis Zvizdic said on Tuesday, dismissing allegations by some European leaders that radical Bosnian Muslims in the Balkan country were posing a terrorist threat for Europe.

Bosnian Muslims generally practice a moderate form of Islam but some have adopted radical Salafi Islam from foreign fighters who came to the country during its 1992-95 war to fight alongside Muslims against Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats.

Some joined Islamic State in Syria and Iraq but police said departures had stopped completely in the past 18 months and more than half of those who returned have been jailed under a law prohibiting people to fight in foreign countries.

Czech President Milos Zeman has said there was a risk Islamic State may form its European base in Bosnia, where “ISIS [Islamic State] black flags are already flying in several towns,” according to reports.

Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic has warned of “thousands of fighters returning to Bosnia from Syria and Iraq,” while Croatian magazine Globus last week put the number of radicalized Bosnian Muslims at 5,000-10,000.

Zvizdic said such allegations were unfounded and politically motivated and could damage Bosnia as an investment and tourism destination.

“ISIS flags are not flying in Bosnia,” Zvizdic told reporters after meeting the security minister and the heads of five security and intelligence agencies.

“There have been no departures to foreign war zones, we have not had any incident that could be characterized as an act of terrorism and we work to prevent the possibility of any such incident,” Zvizdic said, referring to the last two years during which several terrorist attacks took place across Europe.

Bosnia’s security agencies say a total of 240 Bosnian citizens have departed to fight for Islamic State since 2012, and 116 remained there. Out of 44 who had returned to Bosnia, 23 were jailed.

Security Minister Dragan Mektic said terrorism threats in Bosnia were mainly external and its agencies last month prevented a person with possible links to terrorists from entering the country.

In 2015, two Bosnian army soldiers and a policeman were killed in two separate attacks in Bosnia. No links to wider groups was found.
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