Author: The Frontier Post

PARIS (Reuters): France’s main far left party, the hardline CGT trade union and some 80 other organisations, led several thousand people in street protests across France on Saturday against French President Emmanuel Macron’s reforms of the public sector.
Organisers hoped that the protests would grow further into a groundswell of support against Macron’s reform of France’s public service and some state enterprises such as the heavily indebted national railway company SNCF.
“We are going to carry a message (and) this message must be heard by the strong-headed Emmanuel Macron,” Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the far left France Unbowed party, told a cheering crowd before the protest set off in the southern port city of Marseille. Melenchon listed a number of grievances including staff shortages at hospitals, limited admissions at universities, and lack of police in tough neighbourhoods, because the government says it does not have the means to fund them. “We do not be-lieve you because you are ly-ing,” Melenchon said, adding that Macron’s government had given a 4.5 billion euros ($5.25 billion) tax break to the rich which could have been invested in hospitals. “The country is rich. The country must share,” Melenchon said.
In Paris, Police said some 30 people were arrested before the start of the march for various offences. Holding banners and chanting slogans, protesters are expected to hold rallies in at least 160 places across France, CGT Secretary General Philippe Martinez said.

PANAMA CITY (Reuters): Former Panama president Ricardo Martinelli, jailed in Miami on spying charges while awaiting extradition to his home country, said in a letter released Friday that the United States reneged on promises from some US officials to offer him a safe-haven. “After years of friendship with this country, I did not expect to be thrown in a US jail,” he wrote in a letter dated May 14 and released by a spokesman.
Martinelli was jailed last year in the United States after Panama requested extradition on charges that he used public money to spy on more than 150 political rivals during his 2009-2014 term. A US court authorized the extradition last year, and Martinelli last month maintained his innocence but said he would stop fighting the proceedings for judgment in Panama.
In the four-page letter, Martinelli says Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela, a former ally, had sought political revenge, and that he expected the United States to offer “protection” from Varela’s government. He also detailed examples of assisting the United States to curb cross-border crime, such as halting a North Korean ship traveling from Cuba with planes, missiles and radar. “When the CIA requested that I stop a North Korean ship leaving Cuba that was crossing the Panama Canal, I did not blink an eye,” the letter states.
Martinelli, a wealthy supermarket magnate, also said he understood that high-ranking US officials had agreed to let him settle in the United States “without fear.” Reuters could not immediately verify Martinelli’s claims. “I was under the impression that promises made by such government officials could be relied upon. I was mistaken,” he added in the letter, which was addressed to the “government and people of the United States”.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters): An ex-member of an informal police force running for Mexico’s Senate is battling attacks labeling her a “kidnapper,” drawing attention to radical proposals by her ally, presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, to end the drug war. Nestora Salgado, who once ran a local community police force in the opium-rich southwestern state of Guerrero, said she had filed a lawsuit accusing ruling party presidential candidate Jose Antonio Meade of defamation after he called her a “kidnapper” in a televised debate.
The fight over whether Salgado is a heroic social activist or a criminal has put a spotlight on wider differences between presidential candidates over how to fix Mexico’s law and order problems, a major campaign theme ahead of the July 1 election. Meade, third placed in polls, kept up pressure against his rival and Salgado in a Tweet on Friday, writing that as president he would follow the law without exception “while others opt for amnesty and form alliances with criminals.”
Lopez Obrador is exploring a plan for criminal amnesty to quell the country’s gang-related violence, on the heels of the bloodiest year in a war against drug gangs that has tallied up at least 200,000 homicides over the past decade. The amnesty idea, along with his backing of Salgado and Jose Manuel Mireles Valverde, a former vigilante leader in the gang-terrorized state of Michoacan, is an attempt to secure votes from indigenous and other marginalized groups drawn into the drug war, said Javier Oliva Posada, a political science professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Salgado, 46, helped found her local policing group after witnessing the kidnapping and murder of a young taxi driver in 2012, part of the “autodefensa,” or self-defense, movement that grew a few years ago in towns with little trust in either armed drug gangs or the police forces sent to fight them. Salgado’s group was considered legal under a Guerrero state law allowing self-policing in certain cases. In 2013, Salgado, a dual US-Mexico citizen, was arrested after the families of six teenage girls locally accused of dealing drugs said her group had kidnapped and extorted them.
Salgado spent two years and seven months in prison but a federal judge in 2016 acquitted her of all charges. In a 2016 report, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission said that Salgado’s arrest violated her right to due process. But the entity also recognized that 12 prisoners, including four minors, in Salgado’s town of Olinala had experienced human right violations at the hands of community police groups. Lopez Obrador has said Meade’s attacks are a “dirty war.”
“She is fighting for there to be peace and tranquility and was accused in a despicable way,” Lopez Obrador said at a campaign rally in the central state of Jalisco this week. Salgado has maintained her innocence. “In the two years that I’ve been free, the campaign now attacking me hasn’t made a single sound,” she said in a radio interview on Thursday. “Now that I am a running candidate, they want to make me wear the mask of a criminal.”

BERLIN (AP): A German far-right party that swept into parliament last year on a wave of anti-migrant sentiment is staging a march Sunday through the heart of Berlin to protest against the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, accusing it of ruining Germany by allowing the mass immigration of refugees. Alternative for Germany, or AfD, took 12.6 percent of the vote in September’s national election, coming third behind Merkel’s conservative Union bloc and the center-left Social Democrats. After those two agreed to continue their governing coalition, AfD became the largest opposition party, a role that traditionally accords parties in Germany a prominent platform to promote their positions in Parliament.
AfD’s novice lawmakers have struggled to grasp basic parliamentary procedures and have stood out mainly with blunt attacks on minorities, particularly Muslims, who made up the majority of the more than 1 million asylum-seekers to enter Germany in 2015 and 2016. Co-leader Alice Weidel was formally censured by parliament earlier this month for describing girls who wear Islamic headscarves as “useless people.” Sunday’s rally, starting at Berlin’s main train station and ending at the landmark Brandenburg Gate, is highly unusual for a German political party. While other parties have in recent years supported protests on a variety of issues from animal rights to opposing free trade AfD is the sole organizer of the march headlined “Germany’s Future.” David Bebnowski, an expert who studies political protest, says AfD appears to be trying to portray itself as a champion of popular anger against the government in Europe’s biggest economy. “A demonstration is a classic expression of discontent outside parliament,” he told The Associated Press.
Its move to the streets may also be an attempt to align itself more closely with the anti-Islam group PEGIDA, which has held weekly rallies in Dresden in recent years, said Bebnowski, a historian at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam. It also reflects the party’s tactic of provoking opponents to gain attention, he said. AfD has threatened lawsuits against journalists, rival politicians and officials who have criticized it, even as it accuses opponents of using “Nazi methods.” On Wednesday, party officials warned that far-left extremists could try to violently stop its rally in Berlin.
“This isn’t a family excursion where you take your kids along,” said Guido Reil, an AfD official organizing the rally. More than a dozen groups have announced plans to stage counter-protests Sunday, including artists and a coalition of Berlin music clubs hoping to “blow away” AfD with loud techno beats. Berlin police are reportedly planning to put some 2,000 officers on the streets to keep the peace. Bebnowski said the march could turn into a public relations disaster for AfD if it fails to prevent neo-Nazi groups and other extremists from joining its event. Party officials say some 100 stewards will watch out for banned symbols and chants.
Yet while the party publicly distances itself from extremism, German media have uncovered that dozens of regional and national lawmakers and AfD staff have links to neo-Nazi groups such as Blood & Honor and the Identitarian Movement, a white nationalist group that’s under surveillance by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. Observers have noted a clear rightward drift in the party in recent years, with prominent members expressing anti-Semitic and revisionist views not heard in German mainstream politics for decades. At least two AfD lawmakers have been convicted of incitement to hatred over the past year and its former leader, Frauke Petry, cited concerns about the party’s direction when she quit AfD just after last year’s election.
Georg Pazderski, a regional leader in Berlin, said he hopes a large turnout will demonstrate that the party is supported by ordinary people. Having secured seats in 14 state assemblies and the national parliament since its founding in 2013, AfD is setting its sights on a double-digit result in the Bavaria and Hesse state elections this fall. The party has told Berlin police to prepare for 10,000 people. This week, senior AfD officials sought to lower the bar, saying they expect at least 2,500 participants and 5,000 would be a “great success.”