Pope Francis refused to accept the resignation Tuesday of French Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, who was convicted of failing to report sexual abuse allegations to police.

Barbarin said Tuesday he submitted his resignation at the Vatican on Monday but the pope “spoke of the presumption of innocence and did not accept” it.

Francis instead asked Barbarin, the most senior French cleric involved in the Catholic Church’s worldwide pedophilia scandal, to do what Barbarin believes is is best for the Lyon archdiocese. The 68-year-old cardinal has decided to take a leave of absence and has asked his assistant to assume leadership of the archdiocese.

Barbarin was sentenced to a six-month suspended sentence earlier this month for failing to report a predator priest to authorities. The priest, Benard Preynat, allegedly sexually abused boy scouts in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Barbarin plans to appeal his conviction, which was applauded by abuse victims as the beginning of a new era of accountability in the French Church.

The pope has previously defended Barbarin, saying in 2016 that his resignation before a trial would be “an error, imprudent.”

 
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When Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives Thursday in Rome he will not be short of compatriots to exchange pleasantries with in the short amount of sightseeing built into the schedule for his state visit, the first of three stops in Europe, which will take him to France and Monaco, too.

Italy’s “eternal city” has been a magnet for increasing Chinese tourism and regardless of season Rome’s Fiumicino airport is crowded with Chinese tourist groups clogging up security gates and the duty-free stores.

Tourism

The profitable year-round Chinese influx is welcomed by many Italians — the newcomers make up for a dip in tourist numbers since the 2008 global financial crash from the U.S. and Italy’s European neighbors.

But Chinese tourism is not, according to some analysts, all that it might seem.

Beijing is not shy of using tourism as a tool of statecraft to reward friends and punish critics, Stratfor, a U.S. based geopolitical intelligence company, warned recently. Beijing directs tourism flows by granting countries Approved Destination Status. “This designation regulates where Chinese package tour groups are authorized to go and how tours are marketed in mainland China,” says Stratfor.

And that can make a considerable trickle-or-flood difference in the numbers.

In 2017, Beijing managed to reduce by more than half the number of Chinese tourists traveling to South Korea to punish Seoul for deploying the U.S.-supplied Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile defense system.

Investment opportunities

Tourism, though, is not at the top of Xi Jinping’s agenda for his stop in Rome. Italy is considering joining Beijing’s global trade and infrastructure program, informally known as the New Silk Road and formally as The Belt and Road Initiative, BRI.

A giant trillion-dollar trade, investment and infrastructure project, the BRI is Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy and since 2013 Beijing has already invested nearly $700 billion into more than 60 countries.

Much of the investment is in the form of large-scale infrastructure loans to down-at-heel governments and the idea as outlined by the Chinese leader was to draw these countries closer to Beijing while boosting Chinese soft power abroad.

Some analysts see a parallel with tourism when it comes to the BRI. The enormous investment project can easily, they argue, be leveraged for political influence — much as China has done on a smaller scale with tourism.

In Rome this week, the cash-strapped Italian government is due to sign a memorandum of understanding to participate in Xi’s signature program, allowing China’s interests into sectors like telecoms and ports. Italy would become the first G7 country to participate formally in the BRI.

And that is alarming both Washington and EU leaders, who are growing wary of Beijing’s burgeoning clout on a Continent allied to the U.S.

A dozen EU countries, including Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Slovenia, have already signed MoUs with Beijing.

“On the surface, Rome’s official participation in Beijing’s trillion-dollar venture is purely an economic issue between the two nations. In reality, however, it is not that simple,” according to Xuan Loc Doan, an analyst the Global Policy Institute, a London-based think tank on international affairs.

“Some regard it as a strategic tool for Beijing to extend its sphere of influence. For others, instead of empowering participating countries, the scheme puts some of them under huge debt,” he wrote in a commentary.

Expanding influence

In a recent summit on the New Silk Road, Helmut Scholz, a German member of the European Parliament, noted: “The BRI is often compared to the Marshall Plan. However, the New Silk Road will mainly provide loans, and not grants, unlike the Marshall Plan. It means those loans will have to repaid.” He worries that the BRI will lead countries that take loans into a debt trap, which can then be used for political leverage by Beijing.

The European Parliament in September warned that the infrastructure projects under China’s massive program “could create large debts” for European countries that take BRI loans.

Chinese officials dispute the criticism, arguing that it is a project that can help solve some of the most daunting challenges faced by mankind. China’s official news agency, Xinhua, says “the initiative is a perfect example of China sharing its own wisdom and solutions for global growth and governance.”

The Italian move to sign on for BRI has angered the European Commission, which earlier this month dubbed China “an economic competitor in pursuit of technological leadership and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.”

That followed a warning from the National Security Council in the White House, which tweeted on March 9, “Endorsing BRI lends legitimacy to China’s predatory approach to investment and will bring no benefits to the Italian people.”

Italy’s unruly populist coalition government has been divided about whether to sign a BRI agreement with Beijing. Much of the drive behind lies with Italy’s sputtering economy. The coalition leaders made many costly promises to voters in last year’s elections — promises they cannot keep, from improving state pensions to giving all Italians a ‘living wage.’

The country’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, has endeavored to walk a middle way, telling the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that Italy remains firmly a good friend to the U.S., but he cannot see why that should stop the Italian government from signing an agreement with China. “I think it can be an opportunity for our country,” Conte said.

But trying to have it both ways may not work. Coalition leaders, right-wing populist Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio, the leader of the anti-establishment Five Star party, are ideological bedfellows of the Trump administration. However their willingness to cosy up to Beijing at the same time is adding to their reputation of being contradictory and unreliable, say U.S. officials.

“The inevitable result will be a cooling of relations between Washington and Rome,” predicts a U.S. diplomat based in Rome.
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Spain this month marked the 15th anniversary of the 2004 train bombings that killed 193 people with calls to reopen investigations into the deadliest terrorist attack in the kingdom’s history, amid allegations the government covered up links between jihadist bombers and the Basque separatist group, ETA.

Spain’s highest jurisdictional court, the Audencia Nacional, announced last week it is instructing the attorney general to review classified information on the bombings and consider new evidence. Officials with the attorney general’s office have said they are forming a task force with about 200 law enforcement officers to handle the extensive analysis and security work that may be required if the the politically-charged case is reopened.

At remembrance services in Madrid, conservative opposition leader Pablo Casado called on the government to “declassifiy any information that helps get to the truth, which,” he warned,  “someone may try to conceal or use in some way.”

Jose Luis Avalos, a spokesman for the Socialist government, accused Casado of playing politics with the suffering of victims and said the conservative Popular Party had “built a great lie” around  the terrorist attacks that took place when it was in power.

At the time of the bombings, Popular Party prime minister Jose Maria Aznar initially blamed ETA.  Evidence later surfaced pointing to Islamic terrorists as the ones who put a total of ten explosive devices on commuter trains and at rail stations in various parts of Madrid, all going off within minutes of each other.  

Bombings just before elections

The attacks took place just three days before scheduled general elections which the socialists won handily by campaigning on the Aznar government’s  failure to identify the perpetrators of one of the worst terror attacks to ever hit Europe.

Al-Qaida claimed the coordinated bombings were punishment for Spain’s alliance with the United States and Britain for the invasion of Iraq in the second Gulf War. Immediately upon replacing Aznar, Socialist prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero withdrew the 5,000 troops that Spain had contributed to the U.S.-led multi-national force in Iraq. 

An investigation conducted under the socialist government assigned full blame for the bombings to a group of about 20 mostly Moroccan-born suspects who had records as petty criminals and drug dealers and who authorities said had been recruited by al-Qaida in Spain.

Some analysts have since cast doubts on the investigation, which critics say fell short of explaining how the attacks were organized and ignored evidence pointing to possible involvement by the Basque separatist group. 

“Zapatero did not allow the security services and the attorney general to weave the threads leading  to ETA  because it wouldn’t fit his needle hole,”  charged investigative journalist Luis del Pino, who has written a book and made a documentary on the bombings.

Link to ETA

The head of the Islamic cell charged with conducting the train bombings, Jamal Ahmidan, operated for years as an underworld drug dealer and gunman in the Basque city San Sebastian, an ETA stronghold.

Suarez Trashorras, the supplier of stolen dynamite used in the attacks, told police that Ahmidan had said he knew two members of ETA who had been arrested while moving tons of explosives days before he picked up the dynamite, according to the newspaper El Mundo.  

Ahmidan died along with the six other suspected train bombers when an explosion demolished their hideout during a siege by police. 

But a forensic analysis that raised suspicions of possible ETA links was omitted from an official report on the bombings submitted to a Spanish judge  leading the investigations in 2005 according to police officials. The same sources have told  journalists that traces of boric acid found at an apartment rented by one of the bombers had been only been detected previously at an ETA safe house.

Missing information

The analysts said that it was a rare method used to preserve or conceal explosives from detection. 

“This brings us  to the possibility that the author (or) authors of these acts are related among each other and/or may have had the same type of formation  and/or could be the same authors,” according to the forensic report prepared by the police scientific unit that later turned up among documents requested by former interior minister Alfredo Rubalcaba.

Former National Police Director General Agustin Diaz de Mera has said that police officials who elaborated the official report left out the information due to “political pressures.”
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Spanish far-right party Vox has signed up three former generals to run for parliament in next month’s general election, two of whom expressed support for the legacy of former right-wing dictator Francisco Franco by signing a petition last year. 

The inclusion of openly pro-Franco candidates with senior military backgrounds underscores the ground that Vox has broken in a country that had largely shied away from far-right, militaristic politics since Franco’s rule ended with his death in 1975. 

Former Gens. Agustin Rosety and Alberto Asarta will run as parliamentary candidates for the provinces of Cadiz and Castellon, Vox said. Another former general, Manuel Mestre, is running in Alicante, according to the party. Vox had already enlisted another general to run for mayor in Palma de Mallorca. 

Rosety and Asarta signed a manifesto last year in support of Franco’s legacy, including the military uprising that ignited the 1936-39 Spanish civil war and resulted in his rule until 1975. 

Asarta signed the manifesto last year, according to a copy of it, while Rosety has signed it subsequently, said local media.  

The manifesto, which was has been signed by about 600 former members of the armed forces, was issued as a response to the Socialist government’s plans to remove Franco’s remains from a state mausoleum outside Madrid, according to the promoters. The mausoleum has long been seen by critics as a monument to fascism. 

Latest opinion polls show support for Vox, which opposes gender equality laws and immigration and has a strong stance against independence for Spain’s regions, as high as 12.1 percent. That could translate into 38 seats in the national parliament at the April 28 election. 

Vox grabbed attention last year when it became the first far-right party in Spain in more than four decades to score an electoral victory, winning seats in a local election in Andalusia. 

The Franco mausoleum at the Valley of the Fallen has long been a source of controversy. The Socialist government said last Friday that the dictator’s body would be removed on June 10 and reburied in the family tomb at a state cemetery outside Madrid.
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