Baltic countries are moving to protect NATO’s eastern flank in the face of Russian aggression. The Baltic defense line — a new fortification system along their borders with Russia and Belarus — is meant to shield NATO allies from potential attacks. VOA’s Eastern Europe Bureau Chief Myroslava Gongadze reports from the Latvia-Russia border. VOA footage and editing by Daniil Batushchak.
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BANGKOK — A court in Thailand on Thursday found Daniel Sancho Bronchalo, a member of a famous Spanish acting family, guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced him to life in prison, in a lurid case that involved the victim being dismembered.

The Koh Samui Provincial Court issued an initial sentence of death for Sancho but commuted it to life imprisonment due to his cooperation during the trial, said police Colonel Paisan Sangthep, deputy commander of the Surat Thani Provincial Police, who attended the hearing.

Sancho, a 30-year-old chef with a YouTube channel, had been charged with the murder of Edwin Arrieta Arteaga, a 44-year-old plastic surgeon from Colombia, when both were vacationing on the Thai holiday island of Koh Pha-ngan in August last year.

The island is famous for its monthly “Full Moon” beach parties, attracting travelers from around the world for all-night raves.

The convicted man is the son of Rodolfo Sancho Aguirre, a prominent Spanish actor, and Silvia Bronchalo, who has also been in acting. Both parents attended Thursday’s court session.

The court also ordered Sancho to pay more than 4.2 million baht ($125,000) in compensation to the victim’s family. Lawyers representing the family at the trial had asked for 30 million baht ($882,000), Spain’s EFE news agency reported.

EFE also quoted Sancho’s father telling media after the verdict that he intended “to always keep fighting, to keep fighting.”

At his trial on the island of Samui, Daniel Sancho had claimed he got into a fight with Arrieta for allegedly trying to sexually assault him. He said that Arrieta fell as they scuffled and hit his head on a bathtub, losing consciousness and then dying.

He had pleaded not guilty to charges of premeditated murder.

Sancho acknowledged dismembering the victim’s body and disposing of the parts on land and at sea. For the charge of concealing or damaging a body, he received a four-month prison sentence, reduced to two months for acknowledging the act, said Paisan.

He had also pleaded not guilty to the charge of destroying another person’s documents — the victim’s passport — for which he received a two-year prison term.

The elements of the case — violent death on a holiday island, the celebrity connections and the lurid details — attracted huge coverage in Spanish media. HBO produced a Spanish-language documentary on the events.

The case came to light when trash collectors found what the Bangkok Post newspaper described as a sawed-off pelvis and intestines weighing about 5 kilograms (11 pounds) in a fertilizer sack at a garbage dump.

Shortly after that, Sancho reported to police that Arrieta was missing, and police then gathered evidence linking the two men that led them to detain and interrogate him.

Police established a narrative, claiming to the press that Sancho had confessed to the murder and saying he had planned it because Arrieta threatened to disgrace him and his family by revealing their alleged sexual relationship.

Sancho, through his father and his lawyers, said that was a distorted version of what he told police and denied having a sexual relationship with Arrieta.

Police obtained surveillance video showing Sancho allegedly purchasing a knife, rubber gloves, garbage bags and cleaning solutions at a convenience store before Arrieta’s death, which prosecutors claimed bolstered the charge of premeditated murder. 

In his closing statement earlier in his trial, Sancho told the court he regretted his actions, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported.

“I am sorry that a life has been lost and that parents have lost a son,” Sancho said. “I am sorry that his family was not able to bury him properly. I’m sorry for what I did after the death.”

Under certain conditions, Sancho can apply to be repatriated to serve the remainder of his prison term back home after several years of incarceration in Thailand, according to a treaty between Thailand and Spain.

The handful of Spanish nationals in Thai prisons includes another man convicted of premeditated murder and dismembering his victim.

Artur Segarra Princep was convicted of the 2016 killing of fellow Spaniard David Bernat. Police suspected that Segarra robbed the victim, whom he was said to have known. The body was kept in a freezer in Segarra’s Bangkok apartment until parts were tossed into Thailand’s Chao Phraya River.

His 2017 death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2020 by Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn.
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Berlin — The suspects in the foiled plot to attack Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna earlier this month sought to kill “tens of thousands” of fans before the CIA discovered intelligence that disrupted the planning and led to arrests, the agency’s deputy director said.

The CIA notified Austrian authorities of the scheme, which allegedly included links to the Islamic State group. The intelligence and subsequent arrests ultimately led to the cancellation of three sold-out Eras Tour shows, devastating fans who had traveled across the globe to see Swift in concert.

CIA Deputy Director David Cohen addressed the failed plot during the annual Intelligence and National Security Summit, held this week in Maryland.

“They were plotting to kill a huge number — tens of thousands of people at this concert, including I am sure many Americans — and were quite advanced in this,” Cohen said Wednesday. “The Austrians were able to make those arrests because the agency and our partners in the intelligence community provided them information about what this ISIS-connected group was planning to do.”

Austrian officials said the main suspect, a 19-year-old Austrian man, was inspired by the Islamic State group. He allegedly planned to attack outside the stadium, where upwards of 30,000 fans were expected to gather, with knives or homemade explosives. Another 65,000 fans were likely to be inside the venue. Investigators discovered chemical substances and technical devices during a raid of the suspect’s home.

Austria’s interior minister, Gerhard Karner, previously said help from other intelligence agencies was needed because Austrian investigators, unlike some foreign services, can’t legally monitor text messages.

The 19-year-old’s lawyer has said the allegations were “overacting at its best,” and contended Austrian authorities were “presenting this exaggeratedly” in order to get new surveillance powers.

Swift broke her silence about the cancellations last week after her London shows had concluded.

“Having our Vienna shows cancelled was devastating,” she wrote in a statement posted to Instagram. “The reason for the cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of guilt because so many people had planned on coming to those shows.”

She thanked authorities — “thanks to them, we were grieving concerts and not lives,” she wrote — and said she waited to speak until the European leg of her Eras Tour concluded to prioritize safety.

“Let me be very clear: I am not going to speak about something publicly if I think doing so might provoke those who would want to harm the fans who come to my shows,” she wrote.

Concert organizer Barracuda Music said it canceled the three-night Vienna run that would have begun Aug. 8 because the arrests made in connection to the conspiracy were too close to showtime.

The main suspect and a 17-year-old were taken into custody on Aug. 6, the day before the cancellations were announced. A third suspect, 18, was arrested Aug. 8. Their names have not been released in line with Austrian privacy rules.

The shows in London, the next stop after Vienna, came on the heels of a stabbing at a Swift-themed dance class that left three little girls dead in the U.K. In a statement issued after the Southport attack, Swift said she was “just completely in shock” and “at a complete loss for how to ever convey my sympathies to these families.” News outlets reported that Swift met with some of the survivors backstage in London.

The Vienna plot also drew comparisons to a 2017 attack by a suicide bomber at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, that killed 22 people. The bomb detonated at the end of Grande’s concert as thousands of young fans were leaving, becoming the deadliest extremist attack in the United Kingdom in recent years.

Cohen on Wednesday praised the CIA’s work in preventing the planned violence, saying that other counterterrorism “successes” in foiling plots typically go unheralded.

“I can tell you within my agency, and I’m sure in others, there were people who thought that was a really good day for Langley,” he said, referring to the CIA headquarters. “And not just the Swifties in my workforce.”

The record-smashing tour is on hiatus until the fall.
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PARIS — A lawyer for Telegram boss Pavel Durov, who is being investigated in France, said it was “totally absurd” to suggest the head of a social network was responsible for any criminal acts committed on the platform, French media said.

A French judge put Durov under formal investigation on Wednesday, saying he was suspected of complicity in running an online platform that allows illicit transactions, images of child sex abuse and drug trafficking. He is also being investigated for alleged money laundering and the refusal to cooperate with judicial authorities.

Durov, who spent four days in police custody following his arrest on Saturday at an airport near Paris, was granted bail on condition he pays $5.6 million, reports twice a week to police and does not leave French territory.

His arrest has fueled debate on where freedom of speech ends and enforcement of the law begins, and to what extent tech companies should be held responsible for social media content. Telegram is used by close to a billion people.

“It’s totally absurd to think that the head of a social network could be involved in criminal acts that do not concern him, either directly or indirectly,” lawyer David-Olivier Kaminski, who is representing Durov in France, said in comments to reporters carried by several local media outlets.

“Telegram fully abides with European rules on digital,” he was quoted as saying.

Being placed under formal investigation in France does not imply guilt or necessarily lead to trial, but indicates judges consider there is enough evidence to proceed with the probe. Investigations can last years before being sent to trial or shelved.

Kaminski did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who is known to be an avid user of Telegram, said earlier this week that Durov’s arrest was “in no way a political decision” and that the probe had been decided by judicial authorities, not by the government.

Macron had lunch with Durov in 2018 as part of a series of meetings with tech entrepreneurs, a source close to the president said, and Durov was granted French citizenship in 2021 under a rare procedure for high-profile individuals.
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Following more than nine months of unjust detention, American-Russian journalist Alsu Kurmasheva is adjusting to life in freedom with her family in Prague. While in Washington this week to receive an award, she tells VOA’s Liam Scott the fate of other political prisoners is on her mind. Camera: Cristina Caicedo Smit, Hoshang Fahim, Adam Greenbaum, Krystof Maixner, Martin Bubenik
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Washington — Russian opposition politician Ilya Ponomarev says he saw no reason to be suspicious when he received what appeared to be an email from former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, a trusted contact with whom he communicates periodically.

“This letter was visually no different from his other letters. I believed that it was his letter because it was visually no different from his other letters,” Ponomarev told VOA Russian in a Zoom interview.

But this email from several months ago turned out to be one of numerous “phishing attacks” targeting U.S. diplomats and others that have been identified as the work of two cyber-espionage outfits linked to the Russian government. And the fact that it accurately mimicked McFaul’s previous messages indicated the attackers had already seen those earlier messages.

“The letter contained a reference to a report on Ukraine that McFaul supposedly intended to deliver in China, and also a request to check whether he had mixed something up,” Ponomarev said. McFaul did in fact deliver a lecture to Chinese students in April.

McFaul has confirmed to VOA that he was the target of a hacker attack but did not elaborate. The details of the attack were revealed in a recent joint report from the digital rights group Access Now and the Canadian research nonprofit Citizen Lab.

The report says the attacks were conducted between October 2022 and August 2024 by two “threat actors close to the Russian regime” known as ColdRiver and ColdWastrel.

According to The Washington Post, “multiple governments” have said that ColdRiver works for the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the Soviet KGB, while ColdWastrel is believed to be “working for another Russian agency.”

Among their targets were exiled Russian opposition figures, employees of U.S. think tanks, former U.S. ambassadors to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, political figures and academics, employees of American and European non-profit organizations, and media organizations.

VOA has spoken with several of those named as victims, including former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, a Russian journalist and a Russian human rights activist, as well as Ponomarev and McFaul.

The goal of phishing attacks is to try to get a user to click on a malicious link or enter their data – login and password – on a fake website. If the attack is successful, hackers gain access to the victim’s confidential information, including correspondence, contact lists and, in some cases, financial information.

Hackers conducting phishing campaigns employ a technique called “social engineering,” which a leading American cyber security software and services company described as using “psychological manipulation” designed to trick users into divulging sensitive information.

Herbst, who is currently director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, told VOA that he has been facing attacks from Russian hackers for the past 10 years.

The Kremlin “didn’t like from the beginning what I was doing because I was pointing out that they’re conducting an illegal invasion of Ukraine, I guess going back to 2014,” he said.

Herbst said that Russian hackers target people who take a public position aimed at countering Moscow’s aggressive foreign policy: “So, it’s not surprising that people like Steve Pifer or Michael McFaul, or myself have received attention from the FSB, the GRU [Russian military intelligence] and others.”

Herbst added: “I don’t want to overstate the attention they give to us. You know, we are pretty much tertiary or even less than tertiary players on the international political scene, but they know they have such a massive security apparatus that they give some low-level guy the job of following people like me.”

“The stuff that linked me with Mike McFaul or Steve Pifer … was a fishing expedition, right? [To] see if they could get one of them to say something in confidence to me, which would be embarrassing.”

Steven Pifer did not respond to a VOA request for comment on the details of the hacker attack.

Ponomarev said that he responded to the fake McFaul email, but did not have time to download the malicious file attached to it since he was on a plane when he opened the email, and it was inconvenient to download the file from a phone.

“When I opened it on my computer, I noticed that the address he sent it to me from was not his usual Stanford University address, it was something completely different,” Ponomarev told VOA.

“Being an IT guy, I looked at the IP address of the file in the email and was convinced that it was phishing. After that, I passed the information on to the competent authorities so that they could look into the matter further.”

Ponomarev added that the fact the email ostensibly sent by McFaul came from a Proton service mailbox did not initially arouse any particular suspicions.

“I also have an address on Proton, for some kind of confidential correspondence,” he said, noting that attackers can forge addresses on Proton by changing one letter, so that visually it still looks like a regular mailing address.

“They use it because it’s completely anonymous,” Ponomarev added. “You can’t trace an IP address to Proton, so when you use Proton, it’s a dead end, you can’t excavate it any further.”

Polina Machold, publisher of Proekt, an independent Russian media outlet specializing in investigative journalism, told VOA that in the phishing attack targeting her, which took place last November, the hackers also employed social engineering and the Proton mail service.

“I received a letter from a ‘colleague’ from another media outlet, with whom we had previously done a joint project, asking to look at a new potential project or something like that,” Machold told VOA.

“We corresponded for some time, and when it came to opening the file, I discovered that something very suspicious was going on, because the link in the file supposedly led to Proton Drive, but the domain was something completely different.”

Machold said she called a colleague who confirmed that the attacker was pretending to be him. The information was passed on to Citizen Lab, which determined that hackers likely associated with the FSB were behind the attack.

Dmitry Zair-Bek, who heads First Department, a Russian rights group, said that a member of his group was among the first targets of a hacker attack “because we defend people in cases of treason and espionage.”

“One of our employees received an email from an address that mimicked the address of one of our partners,” he said. “The email contained a link that led to a phishing site.”

Zair-Bek added that the ColdWastrel group carried out the attack targeting First Department.

“They are the ‘C’ students of the hacker world,” Zair-Bek said of ColdWastrel. “The idea is the same as the ColdRiver group, they just paid less attention to some small details.

“The fact that they are ‘C’ students does not mean that they are less effective. They choose a person who from their point of view, on the one hand, has the largest amount of information that interests them and, on the other hand, is the most vulnerable.”

Even someone well-versed in digital security issues can fall for the bait of hackers, says Natalia Krapiva, an expert at Access Now, which co-authored the report on the Russian hacker attacks.

“The ColdRiver and ColdWastrel groups use quite sophisticated social engineering, a very good understanding of the context,” she told VOA.

“They know how the organization is structured in general, which people are responsible for finance, HR, politics, and so on. That is, they know which employee to send this [phishing] email to. They also understand with whom these organizations interact and on what issues.”

“We have seen examples of exploiting existing relationships between a Russian and an American human rights organization,” Krapiva added, noting that hackers knew that one of the organizations was waiting for a grant application and sent a malicious PDF file to the employee who was waiting for it.

This suggests that hackers already have a certain amount of information at the time they attempt to attack their victims, she said.
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WASHINGTON — Two men from Europe are charged in a plot to call in bogus reports of police emergencies to harass and threaten members of Congress, senior U.S. government officials and dozens of other people, according to an indictment unsealed on Wednesday. 

Thomasz Szabo, 26, of Romania and Nemanja Radovanovic, 21, of Serbia targeted at least 100 people with “swatting” calls to instigate an aggressive response by police officers at the victims’ homes, the federal indictment alleges. 

The calls also included threats to carry out mass shootings at New York City synagogues and to set off explosives at the U.S. Capitol and a university, the indictment said. A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., handed up the indictment last Thursday. 

Online court records in Washington didn’t say if Szabo or Radovanovic have been arrested or if they are represented by attorneys. A court filing accompanying their indictment said investigators believed they were in separate foreign countries last week. A spokesperson for the office of Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, declined to elaborate. 

Szabo and Radovanovic are both charged with conspiracy and more than two dozen counts of making threats. The plot spanned more than three years, from December 2020 through January 2024, according to prosecutors. 

“Swatting is not a victimless prank — it endangers real people, wastes precious police resources, and inflicts significant emotional trauma,” Graves said in a statement. 

Szabo organized and moderated chat groups to coordinate swatting attacks against 40 private citizens and 61 officials, including cabinet-level members of the federal government’s executive branch, the head of a federal law enforcement agency, a federal judge, current and former governors, and other state officials, the indictment said. 

In December 2023 and January 2024, Radovanovic allegedly called government agencies to falsely report killings and imminent suicides or kidnappings at the homes of U.S. senators, House members and elected state officials, according to the indictment. One of the calls led to a car crash involving injuries, the indictment alleges.
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Paris — The Opening Ceremony of the Paris Paralympics got underway Wednesday in the center of the French capital, firing the starting gun on 11 days of intense competition.

Just as for the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics on the River Seine in July, it took place away from the main stadium for the first time at a Paralympics.

In balmy weather — in contrast to the heavy rain that blighted the opening of the Olympics on July 26 — the Games opened in Place de la Concorde, in the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron.

The ceremony culminates with the lighting of the cauldron, which has already become a highly popular point of interest in the city since its debut at the Olympics.

When the sporting action begins on Thursday, a new generation of Paralympians will join seasoned veterans competing in many of the same venues that hosted Olympic sports.

Eighteen of the 35 Olympic venues will be used for the Paralympics, which run until September 8, including the Grand Palais, which scored rave reviews for its hosting of fencing and taekwondo under an ornate roof.

The La Defense Arena will again host the swimming events, and track and field will take place on the purple track of the Stade de France.

Sluggish ticket sales have picked up since the Olympics, and more than 2 million of the 2.5 million available have been sold, with several venues sold out.

The Paralympic flame was lit at Stoke Mandeville hospital in England, the birthplace of the Games, and brought to France through the Channel Tunnel before touring French cities.

Theater director Thomas Jolly, who also oversaw the Olympics Opening Ceremony, said there was a deep symbolism in having the Paralympics ceremony in the center of Paris — a city whose Metro system is not adapted to the needs of wheelchair users.

“Putting Paralympic athletes in the heart of the city is already a political marker in the sense that the city is not sufficiently adapted to every handicapped person,” Jolly said earlier this week.

Organizers say wheelchair users can take Paris buses, and they have laid on 1,000 specially adapted taxis as well.

Paralympic powerhouse China will send a strong squad — the Chinese dominated the medals table at the Covid-delayed Games in Tokyo three years ago, winning 96 golds. Britain was second with 41 golds.

Riding the wave of its Olympic team’s success, host nation France will be aiming for a substantial upgrade on the 11 golds it won in 2021, which left it in 14th position. French Sports Minister Amelie Oudea-Castera said she wants France to finish in the top eight of the medals table.

Ukraine, traditionally one of the top medal-winning nations at the Paralympics, have sent a team of 140 athletes spread over 17 sports despite the challenges they face in preparing as the war against Russian forces rages at home.

Russia and Belarus are sending a total of 96 athletes, who will compete under a neutral banner but are barred from the opening and closing ceremonies because of the invasion of Ukraine.

Every Games produces new stars, and in this edition, look to American above-the-knee amputee sprinter/high jumper Ezra Frech to make the headlines.

Away from the track, Iranian sitting volleyball legend Morteza Mehrzad, who stands 8 feet, 1 inch tall, will attempt to take gold again.

International Paralympic Committee President Andrew Parsons told AFP earlier this year he hopes the Paris edition will restore the issues facing disabled people to the top of the list of global priorities.

Parsons believes the Games “will have a big impact in how people with disability are perceived around the world.”

“This is one of the key expectations we have around Paris 2024; we believe that we need people with disability to be put back on the global agenda,” the Brazilian said.

“We do believe people with disability have been left behind. There is very little debate about persons with disability.”
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SINGAPORE  — Pope Francis will embark on the longest overseas tour of his papacy next week, as he visits four countries across Asia and Oceania on a grueling 11-day trip.

The 87-year-old pontiff is scheduled to visit Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and Singapore on a journey emphasizing economic and religious diversity.

The pope has faced recent health challenges and concerns and this is set to be his first overseas trip of 2024.

Francis was forced to pull out of a visit to Dubai last November to recover from a bout of flu and lung inflammation. Ailing health has caused him to cancel several public engagements this year.

The pope currently requires a wheelchair or cane to move about as he deals with mobility issues, caused by persistent knee problems.

Poor health brings doubt on Francis’ ability to complete an 11-day tour in four nations.

“I was extremely surprised when they announced a trip like this. Why four countries? Why so far? Why so long?” said Michel Chambon, a Research Fellow with the Religion and Globalization Cluster at the National University of Singapore.

Added Chambon, he “clearly doesn’t want to slow down.”

Francis will land in Indonesia on Tuesday, becoming the third pope to visit the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.

He will start his visit with a meeting with outgoing President Joko Widodo in the country’s capital, Jakarta.

The pope will host an interfaith gathering with representatives of Indonesia’s six officially recognized religions. The meeting will take place at the largest mosque in Southeast Asia.

“He is going to Indonesia clearly not for Indonesian Catholics. Instead, the priority is to remake and repeat a global statement about Christian-Muslim relations,” Chambon told VOA.

Describing the current state of these relations generally as a “matter of concern,” Chambon says Pope Francis will be “proactive in not letting Christian-Muslim ties be weaponized by political interests.”

Though Francis will aim to promote interfaith tolerance and understanding in Indonesia, ensuring the pontiff’s safety in the country will be a complex challenge.

“Terrorist groups, especially those that target the Catholic Church, still exist in Indonesia and of course Southeast Asia,” said Stanislaus Riyanta, a lecturer at the University of Indonesia’s School of Strategic and Global Studies.

Riyanta says Indonesia’s security services will be on high alert during the visit, enabling them to “carry out early detection, early warning and early prevention of any threats to the pope.”

Security will also be tight in Papua New Guinea when Francis arrives for his first visit to a country in Oceania.

The country’s capital, Port Moresby, was put under a state of emergency in January following deadly riots which spread to other cities in the island-nation of some 10 million people.

Trouble again flared-up in February when a gun fight broke out between tribal communities in remote highlands. Dozens were killed in the violence.

Papua New Guinea is made up of multiple ethnic indigenous groups, with hundreds of languages spoken, yet almost the entirety of the population are Christians, with roughly a quarter Catholic, according to a 2011 census.

Christianity is also dominant in Timor-Leste, the pope’s third stop on his tour. More than 95% of the near 1.5 million population are Catholics, making it one of only two majority-Catholic countries in Asia.

Excitement for the pope’s arrival is building in the former Portuguese colony, but questions remain about a clergy abuse scandal that has shocked the country.

In 2022, the Vatican confirmed that Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo had been sanctioned over allegations that he sexually abused young boys.

Belo, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Timor-Leste independence hero, was disciplined with restrictions placed on his movements and a ban on voluntary contact with minors. He now resides in Portugal.

“We might see, maybe not protests but, strong questions in Timor-Leste from a number of people, because of the question of sex abuse,” Chambon said.

The Vatican is hoping the pontiff will be able to highlight Catholic tenants such as compassion, caring and generosity during his tour, and especially in Timor-Leste, scholars say.

“Pope Francis is seeking to shine a spotlight on, and remind the rest of the world about, struggling communities in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste,” said Jonathan Tan, the Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan Professor of Catholic Studies at Case Western Reserve University.

“They are coping with immense poverty, high illiteracy and unemployment rates, and the effects of climate change on island communities,” Tan told VOA.

Francis’ final stop will be in Singapore, a multi-religious city-state in the heart of Southeast Asia.

Less than 10% of Singapore’s population is Catholic which, according to Tan, presents the pope an opportunity to “encourage and empower minority Catholic communities” in the region.

Francis has made Asia a top priority during his papacy, visiting the continent several times, including trips to South Korea, the Philippines, Japan and Mongolia.

Chambon says the pope’s focus on Asia is a “long-term investment” for the Catholic Church, with his visits “building communion and proximity between Catholics in Asia and the Vatican.”

Trips to the region also present an opportunity for the Vatican to present the ideology of the pope to an Asian audience, says Tan.

“It’s a key issue for the papacy, for the Vatican, to translate its universal ambition into Asian terms and Asian language,” he told VOA.
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NEA SILATA, Greece — Six weeks before harvest, there’s no water left in the ground for farmer Dimitris Papadakis’ olive grove in northern Greece, so he has started a new morning routine.

Joined by his teenage son, he uses a truck to bring water from nearby areas. Using a small generator, he connects the vehicle to irrigation pipes to save what’s left of his thirsty crop.

“Our boreholes have almost dried up … We now depend on tankers to irrigate our fields,” says Papadakis, who heads an agricultural cooperative in a village in Halkidiki, a three-fingered peninsula in northern Greece which is popular with tourists.

This summer, southern Europe has been hammered by successive heat waves, following on from below-average rainfall for up to three years. Drought spots on the map of the region have expanded. In Greece, the effects include water shortages, dried-up lakes, and even the death of wild horses.

The groundwater beneath Papadakis’ 270 olive trees is dwindling and becoming brackish, with the drought expected to cut his expected yield in half.

The water crisis has been exacerbated by a booming tourist season.

In Kassandra, the westernmost finger of the peninsula, the year-round population of 17,000 swells to 650,000 in the summer, placing unsustainable pressure on water resources.

“We’ve seen a 30-40% reduction in water supply following three consecutive winters with almost no rainfall,” says local mayor Anastasia Halkia.

Haroula Psaropoulou owns a home in the area, in the seaside village of Nea Potidea. She says it’s hard to cope with frequent household water cuts that may last up to five days during the searing heat.

“I recycle water from the bathroom sink and from washing, and I use it for the plants,” the 60-year-old Psaropoulou says. “I’ve also carried water from the sea for the toilet.”

According to the European Union’s Emergency Management Service, acute drought conditions currently exist around the Black Sea, stretching westward into northern Greece.

Along the Evros River, which divides Greece and Turkey, severe drought means the delta now has higher levels of seawater. The extra salt is killing the wild horses that depend on the river for drinking water.

“If the horses go without water for a week, they die,” says Nikos Mousounakis, who is leading an initiative to create freshwater drinking points for the horses. “Some of them are still in bad shape, but we hope that with continued help, they’ll recover.”

Until recently, Lake Picrolimni in northern Greece was a popular destination for mud baths, but this summer it’s a shallow basin of cracked earth, dry enough to hold the weight of a car.

“It hasn’t rained for two years now, so the lake has totally dried up,” says local municipal chairman Costas Partsis. “It used to have a lot of water. People came and bathed in the muddy water. The clay has therapeutic properties for many ailments. No one came this year.”

Nearby, Lake Doirani straddles Greece’s northern border with North Macedonia. The shoreline has receded by 300 meters in recent years. Local officials are pleading for public works to restore the river’s water supply, echoing calls from experts who argue that major changes in water management are needed to mitigate the damaging effects of climate change.

“We’re experiencing a prolonged period of drought lasting about three years now, due to lower rainfall and snowfall, a result of the climate crisis and poor water management,” says Konstantinos S. Voudouris, a professor of hydrogeology at the University of Thessaloniki. “The solution lies in three key words: conservation, storage, and reuse.”

Voudouris argues that outdated water networks are losing too much water and that infrastructure improvements must focus on collecting and storing rainwater during the wet season, as well as reusing treated wastewater for agriculture.

“These drought phenomena will return with greater intensity in the future,” Voudouris said. “We need to take action and plan ahead to minimize their impact… and we must adapt to this new reality.”
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CHEMNITZ-EUBA, Germany — Germany’s far-right AfD party, hoping to clinch its first wins in two east German state elections on Sept. 1, is trying to pick up countryside votes by making opposition to renewable energy projects a centerpiece of its campaign.

It proposes tougher new planning rules on constructing turbines, imposing higher energy-storage requirements for renewable projects, and rolling back rules requiring that set proportions of land be used for wind energy.

AfD candidates are also peppering their social media pages with posts about how renewable energy is driving up consumers’ energy bills.

The message is resonating with rural communities frustrated with the center-left federal government’s push towards renewable energies and could boost the AfD in the elections in Thuringia and Saxony, where it is polling in first place on around 30%.

It is unlikely that the AfD will be able to form a government as other parties reject any coalition with it. But, given the size of its vote, the AfD could shift mainstream discourse on wind energy, as it has done with migration, slowing down the implementation of projects, pollsters and analysts say.

“We will immediately take general action to ensure that not many more wind turbines are built here in Saxony,” said Jan Zwerg, the AfD energy policy spokesperson in Saxony.

The AfD could also push legislation against wind power from the opposition ranks, as it has already tried to do with the conservatives in Thuringia.

This could in turn jeopardize Germany’s overall green energy transition goals as the eastern states are the ones offering the necessary space for expansion of wind-power infrastructure due to their lower population density.

“The success of the energy transition will be decided in the east. However, it is precisely here that sensitive resistance has developed, which the AfD is increasingly mobilizing politically,” said Matthias Diermeier, a researcher at German economic institute IW Koeln.

Brroader backlash

The growing opposition to wind energy in Thuringia and Saxony echoes a broader popular backlash in Germany and elsewhere in Europe against the costs of the transition to green energy amid an economic slowdown.

Nearly a third of the rural population in eastern Germany opposes wind power, compared to only 17.7% in rural western Germany, a study by IW Koeln institute and TU Dresden University showed. Among AfD voters, the opposition is around 50%.

In Saxony, support for energy transition has dropped to 40% in 2023, down from 49% in 2021, a September survey by the state’s environment and energy ministry showed.

In villages like Chemnitz-Euba, where a citizens’ initiative is opposing the installation of two wind turbines out of concern that it will lower property values and spoil the landscape, residents are increasingly voting for the AfD.

“This is not about right or left. This is simply about a story that affects all of us,” Frank Stuehmer, leader of the initiative, said at an information event that drew hundreds of concerned citizens. He would therefore be voting AfD for the first time.

The political mood spooks some investors, wary of drawn-out battles with citizen initiatives and district councils.

A spokesperson for a Saxony-based wind power developer, who asked to speak anonymously due to the sensitivity of the matter, told Reuters it now prioritizes projects based on how strong the AfD is polling in different regions.

In Saxony and Thuringia, wind power installations are already lagging, with the two states building a total of just 16 new turbines in 2023, out of 745 installed in all 16 German states, according to the country’s wind power association.

Higher prices

In its Saxony election program, the AfD proposes stringent measures to curb the expansion of wind energy, including a rule requiring wind turbines to be placed at a distance from residential areas equivalent to 10 times their height.

The wind power association said imposing this distance regulation would severely restrict the construction of new systems, citing 41 projects with 882 turbines still pending approval in Saxony as of July this year.

The AfD also says renewable energy expansion is raising domestic energy prices in Saxony, an argument resonating with many. Extensions of transmission and distribution networks can lead to higher network fees, two energy markets experts said.

Adjusted for purchasing power, power and heating prices are already 22% higher in the east compared to western Germany, calculations by power-prices portal Verivox show.

Even if the AfD is in opposition, it can still push in parliament to constrict wind power – especially as the likely fragmentation of the vote in the upcoming elections is expected to make forming stable governments tricky.

“They (AfD) have been working on (shifting the debate) for 10 years and we are seeing this growing resistance among the population. The fact that they are succeeding should definitely not be underestimated,” said Diermeier.
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