Retired Major deported from Hawaii for alleged sexual abuse


2017-02-20

A retired Sri Lanka Army Major attached to the Disaster Management Center (DMC) which was sent for a training programme in Hawaii, was deported last week after he was charged with allegedly sexually abusing a female employee at the hotel he was staying in, the Daily Mirror learns.

 The victim, a mechanical maintenance worker, was called to fix the air conditioning system in the suspect’s room on February 9. The suspect had locked the door, when she entered the room and allegedly sexually abused her, sources said.

 Official sources confirmed the suspect was part of a group sent by the Sri Lankan Government to Hawaii for a course on disaster management rescue and operations. 

The Hawaiian Court which remanded the suspect, later directed he be deported to Sri Lanka and decided to take up the case again in April. The suspect returned to the country on Friday, February 17

. Meanwhile, officials at the Disaster Management Center (DMC) said the official had been sacked with immediate effect. 

The US Embassy has also taken measures to inform the relevant authorities of the incident. (Darshana Sanjeewa)

Nationalize the SAITM and pay compensation to SAITM students– Lahiru Weerakoon

 Feb 20, 2017

Addressing the press conference at CSR held on Feb. 19, 2017 Inter University Students’ Federation (IUSF) convener Lahiru Weerakoon said that they demand government to nationalize the SAITM and pay compensation to SAITM students.

“Government takes advantage of court order and trying to register more private medical faculties.”
He added, “The government already signed a MoU with Manipal Academy of Higher Education Trust (MAHET). They will start their medical faculty at the second stage plan. It has been scheduled in their agreement.”

Lawrence Ferdinando - Colombo

Israel nature exhibition at UN whitewashes occupation

Rather than showing “the northern part of Israel,” this photgraph depicts a wolf in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

Charlotte Silver-20 February 2017

Last week, while US President Donald Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority quietly opened an exhibition at the United Nations headquarters in New York that asserts the occupied Golan Heights and West Bank as Israel’s own territory.

The exhibition, title The Natural Side of Israel, features some 30 photographs that purport to display the “rare and inspiring variety of natural landscapes and unspoiled scenery” in Israel, but in fact include geographic sites that lie on land Israel has occupied for decades.

The first photo in a catalog of the exhibition shows a wolf stopped on a snow-covered opening in a forest in the Golan Heights – Syrian territory occupied by Israel since 1967. But the catalogue identifies the location of the photograph as the “Odem Forest in the northern part of Israel.”

“The wolves living in this part of the country are bigger and darker than the wolves who live in other parts of Israel,” the catalogue states. “Some consider them a subspecies of the grey wolf and call them the Golan wolf.”

When Israel occupied Syria’s Golan Heights five decades ago, it expelled and displaced 130,000 Syrians – most of the population of the territory at the time – and destroyed more than 200 villages, according to a 2010 investigation by the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz.

In 1981, Israel formally annexed the territory. The UN Security Council, of which the United States is a permanent member, considers that annexation null and void.

Israel has exploited the civil war in Syria to strengthen its grip on the Golan Heights, moving forward with plans to drill for oil in the territory.

Netanyahu expressed his desire for the US to acknowledge Israel’s claims to the Syrian territory when he met with Trump last week.

Al-Marsad, the Arab Human Rights Center in the Golan Heights, released a statement urging the international community to reject these efforts to legitimize Israel’s annexation of the territory.

Al-Marsad notes that while 23,000 Israeli settlers currently control 95 percent of the land, 25,000 Syrians are confined to five severely overcrowded villages.

Al-Marsad alleges that these residents endure routine violations of their human rights, many of the same measures used against Palestinians – including family separation, home demolitions and threats from military bases.

“Israel is cynically taking advantage of the ongoing conflict in Syria and a distracted international community, to create ‘new facts on the ground’ in the Golan by rapidly increasing the settler population and the extraction of natural resources,” Al-Marsad states, noting that in 2015 Israel announced plans to increase the number of Israeli settlers in the territory by 100,000 over the next five years.

Exploited natural resources, destroyed villages

The Israel Nature and Parks Authority exhibition at the UN also shows gazelles near the Israeli settlement Moshav Naama in the Jordan Valley of the occupied West Bank, though the occupation is not mentioned in the exhibition.

Moshav Naama is a farm settlement which has unrestricted access to water that is denied to its Palestinian neighbors.

Other sites displayed in the exhibition are in Israel, but on the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages.

The parks authority boasts of the reserves it has created on the Mediterranean seashore, including the Achziv national park near Israel’s border with Lebanon.

The park is built where the Palestinian village Zib once stood.

According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Zib was one of several Palestinian villages destroyed in May 1948 in explicit retaliation for an attack on a Zionist convoy.

In an operation dubbed “Ben Ami,” Jewish troops “were specifically told that the villages had to be eliminated in revenge for the loss of the convoy,” Pappe writes in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

The villages were Sumiriyya, Zib, Bassa, Kabri, Umm al-Faraj and Nahr, all located in the northwest corner of present-day Israel.

Pappe says these villages suffered a “crueler version” of the general “destroy-and-expel” directive given to Zionist forces.

As a result, the operation resulted in one of the quickest depopulation operations during the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, emptying a densely populated areas in just over 24 hours.

The entire 2,000-person population of Zib was driven out, along with thousands of others, leading David Ben-Gurion, the Zionist militia leader who would become Israel’s first prime minister, to announce that the area had been “liberated.”

Today, according to Pappe, Zib’s mosque is left standing in a resort area that is managed by the Israeli parks authority.

The land’s “guardian”

In a written introduction to the exhibition, parks authority director Shaul Goldstein emphasizes his agency’s role as the “guardian” of the land, his staff as “protectors” of the habitats and ecosystems, and claims to “treat nature with reverence.”

In reality, his agency has been a key instrument in confiscating land from Palestinians and entrenching Israel’s occupation.

In occupied East Jerusalem, the government body zones Palestinian residential areas as national parks as a means to limit Palestinian presence there and expand Jewish settlements.

The authority has outsourced the running of one such national park in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood just outside Jerusalem’s Old City, to Elad, a powerful settler group that actively helps displace Palestinian families to settle Jews in their homes.

Repeated throughout the text that accompanies the photographs are biblical references, emphasizing that Israel’s claims to the land are inherited from ancient religious texts. The parks authority proudly explains how it reintroduced species to Israel through a program in the 1960s called “Returning the Animals of the Bible to the Land of the Bible.”

The parks authority also staved off development in the Elah Valley, to the south of Jerusalem, which it claims was the scene of the “famed battle between David and Goliath.”

Such propaganda is nothing new for Israel. But should the United Nations be giving Israeli colonialist mythology which erases the indigenous population a platform in New York?

Turkish protesters demand death for alleged Erdogan 'assassins'

Hundreds call for 44 soldiers to receive death penalty as they face court accused of attempting to kill president

Police surround one of the defendants accused of attempting to kill Erdogan (AFP)

Suraj Sharma-Monday 20 February 2017

Crowds gathered in front of a Turkish court on Monday to call for 44 soldiers to be put to death as they were brought to court to stand trial on charges of attempting to assassinate the country's president in a botched coup attempt last July.    

The defendants, who denied any links to the cleric accused of orchestrating the coup attempt, were bussed in to a courthouse in the western Aegean province of Mugla, not far from the luxury resort where the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and his family narrowly escaped the soldiers, fleeing in a helicopter shortly before their hotel was attacked.

"We want the death penalty. Let the hand that tried to harm our chief be broken," said one of the protesters, 61-year-old Zuhal Ayhan, referring to Erdogan. "I'd give my life for him."

Protesters outside the court in Mugla, western Turkey, on 20 February (AFP)

Erdogan, the main plaintiff in the case, has repeatedly – including over the weekend - said he would not deny the nation's wishes and sign off on a bill reinstating the death penalty if it were presented to him by parliament.

More than 240 people were killed during the 15 July failed coup, when a group of rogue soldiers commandeered tanks, warplanes and helicopters, attacking parliament and attempting to overthrow the government.

On Monday, prosecutors in Mugla charged 44 suspects, almost all of them soldiers, with multiple charges including attempting to assassinate the president, breaching the constitution and membership of an armed terrorist organisation, according to the indictment.

Turkey says the coup was orchestrated by a US-based Turkish preacher, Fethullah Gulen. The cleric, who has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, has denied the charges.

Since the failed coup, more than 40,000 people have been arrested and more than 100,000 have been sacked or suspended from the military, civil service and private sector.

Turkey launched its first criminal trial related to the coup in December and more trials are expected.

'No links to Gulen'

One defendant, Major Sukru Seymen, told the court he had no regrets over attempting a coup. 

"I am not afraid of anything. I committed a coup. I will not be affected even if the punishment for this is a death sentence," he told the court during the afternoon session.

"All I did was carry out the duties given to me. The duty given to us was to take the president to Ankara safely," said Seymen.

Gokhan Sahin Sonmezates, the soldier believed to have led the team sent to assassinate Erdogan and also considered one of the main planners of the coup attempt, however denied being part of the Gulen movement and said the plan was not to assassinate the president, according to court reporters from local media.  

"While the whole world knew that the president was headed to Istanbul, we were deceived and sent there [Marmaris]. I didn't speak to [Erodgan's aide-de-camp]. If I had planned this mission, we either would have succeeded or I would have cancelled the operation," Sonmezates was quoted as saying.

"I don't believe that Fethullah Gulen is a 'messiah' or 'prophet'," he said.

Order given by general, not Gulen, says defendent  

He also said he received his orders from General Semih Terzi, who was shot in the head in Ankara by another soldier, Omer Halisdemir, on the night of the coup.

Terzi's bodyguards in turn shot Halisdemir.   

Huseyin Aydin, one of Erdogan's lawyers, told reporters that none of the defendants were exhibiting any signs of remorse and remain convinced of their mission to assassinate the president.

"At the time they believed that what they were doing was holy anyway. What we observed today is that they still feel the same," said Aydin.

Aydin said the defendants were trained in the most elite units of the Turkish armed forces and their brief was to "pick up president Erdogan and take him somewhere".  

Erdogan's lawyers have said they hope for a quick trial and hope to see the case wrapped up by April at the latest.

The session is expected to last until 15 March with the court hearing evidence from all defendants.

The court calendar foresees another reconvening on 24-28 April and 5-9 June.  

Security was tight, as with court hearings on the failed coup attempt to date.

The area around the court was cordoned off and patrolled by dozens of security force members, including police and special forces. Snipers stood on nearby rooftops.

The court in Mugla was too small to handle the number of defendants and authorities said the trial was being heard at the conference room of the chamber of commerce next door.

According to the indictment, some 37 soldiers were charged with a having a direct role in the storming of the luxury hotel, others are those who provided assistance to the operation.

Reuters also contributed to this report

Burma: Two soldiers injured after clash with militants in Rakhine

A Rohingya refugee child smiles at Leda Unregistered Refugee Camp in Teknaf, Bangladesh, Feb 15, 2017. Pic: Reuters

20th February 2017

TWO members of Burma (Myanmar)‘s security forces were injured in a clash with militants on the troubled Rakhine State border with Bangladesh, Burma’s state counselor’s office said, casting doubt on the government’s claim that the region had stabilised.

The government last week said the situation in northern Rakhine had stabilised and that it had ended a four-month security crackdown on Rohingya Muslims.

The security operation had been under way since nine policemen were killed in attacks on security posts near the Bangladesh border on Oct. 9. Almost 69,000 Rohingyas have since fled to Bangladesh, according to U.N. estimates.

The United Nations has said the security crackdown may amount to crimes against humanity and possibly ethnic cleansing.

SEE ALSO: Burma: Military has ended operations in restive Rakhine state – govt

Two soldiers were wounded in a five-minute clash with a armed group on the border with Bangladesh on Friday afternoon, the State Counselor’s said in a statement late on Saturday.

“The forces providing security forces to workers preparing border fence between the Mile Post 56 and 57 in Buthidaung township were attacked by about 30 unidentified armed men in black uniforms positioned on hills in Bangladeshi side,” the statement said, adding the armed men withdrew after security forces returned fire.

The security forces were still gathering information to identify how many members from the armed group were injured or killed during the clash, the office said in the short statement.

Bangladesh border guards could not immediately be contacted.

Burma’s State Counselor’s Office and military did not immediately respond to requests for comments.

Burma’s government blamed Rohingyas supported by foreign militants for the Oct 9 attacks on police, but has issued scant information about the assailants it called “terrorists.”

SEE ALSO: Burma: Army forms first team to investigate alleged rights abuses in Rakhine

A group of Rohingya Muslims involved in the October attacks is headed by people with links to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the International Crisis Group said in a report last year.

The government, led Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has denied almost all allegations of human rights abuses in Rakhine, including mass killings and gang rapes of Rohingya Muslims, and said the operation was a lawful counterinsurgency campaign.

The violence has renewed international criticism that the Burma leader has done too little to help members of the Muslim minority, many live in apartheid-like conditions in northwestern Burma.

Rohingya Muslims have faced discrimination in Burma for generations. They are regarded as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and many entitled only to limited rights. – Reuters

Everyone at Munich Pretended Everything Was Normal

BY JULIE SMITH-FEBRUARY 20, 2017

According to the organizers, demand to attend this year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC) was unprecedented. I can understand why. People on both sides of the Atlantic — myself included — were eager to hear senior members of the Trump administration talk about the transatlantic relationship at one of the most important and high level transatlantic gatherings of the year. Would the three cabinet members in attendance reflect the sentiments of their boss, who has called NATO obsolete, made disparaging remarks about the European Union, and expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin? Or would Trump’s cabinet members present a positive vision for the transatlantic partners, one that would no doubt stress defense spending but also reassure European allies at a time of considerable uncertainty?

I came to Munich with a few more questions. In the wake of both Brexit and the U.S. election, I was curious how the heads of state, CEOs, and ministers there would address the public’s growing disaffection with so many of the things we would discuss in Munich: globalization, international institutions, and national governments’ ability to respond to the needs of their citizens. Similarly, I was interested in how Western leaders are thinking today about Russia’s blatant attempts to undermine the very system we have spent the last 70 years creating. What fresh ideas would these leaders bring to the conversation?

I was also hoping – perhaps unfairly – that the Munich Security Conference would shed at least parts of its notoriously traditional format: long speeches with little to no time for more than two or three questions (often from the same participants). Given the near endless list of challenges we face, I was hoping the organizers would ban opening statements for everyone except heads of state and the U.S. vice president, challenge panelists with tough follow up questions, and allow some heated debates to unfold.
So what did the participants in this year’s Munich Security Conference get? They got the status quo. In every respect.

With regards to the message from the Washington, participants listened to a collection of America’s greatest hits. Like previous administration officials, Vice President Pence promised America’s strong support for NATO and told Europeans, “Your success is our success.” Pence also shared some touching anecdotes about traveling through Europe with his brother as a young man and later as a member of Congress following 9/11. And unsurprisingly, he pushed Europeans on defense spending just as Defense Secretary James Mattis did during his remarks the day before.

Given President Donald Trump’s well known views on the transatlantic relationship, Europeans were clearly relieved that Pence didn’t depart from America’s standard script about the overarching value of the transatlantic relationship. But they were far from reassured. Immediately following the speech (which did not include Q&A) Europeans asked me if Pence’s views reflected those of the president. Many also noted that the speech lacked any mention of the European Union or specific policy proposals on Russia, Iran, Syria, or China. In fact, other than the broad “peace through strength” theme and a pledge to increase U.S. defense spending, push back on Iran, and hold Russia accountable, the speech was nearly void of content.

By contrast, when then-Vice President Joe Biden spoke in Munich in 2009 at the start of the Obama administration he outlined a long list of the administration’s strategic objectives both at home and abroad. He talked about renewing the relationship with Europe, strengthening U.S.-EU ties, engaging with Russia to secure loose nukes, enhancing missile defense with European allies, investing in renewables, increasing foreign assistance, reaching out to the Muslim world, closing Guantanamo, working towards a two-state solution in the Middle East, and stabilizing the financial system. Folks can take issue with that list, but they can’t accuse the Obama administration of lacking vision. The same cannot be said of the Trump team. Other than “Make America Great Again,” what exactly is Trump’s foreign policy? (Jon Finer, one of our Shadow contributors says Trump simply doesn’t have one.)

So if Pence left the audience at the Munich Security Conference with more questions than answers, how about the other speakers? Well, they too delivered the status quo, often taking great pains to avoid admitting that the West is actually in the soup. Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson described how the United Kingdom would serve as a “buttress on the European cathedral,” supporting the EU while existing outside it. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke about Russia’s pleasant relations with its neighbors. And EU High Representative Federica Mogherini, one of the most dynamic speakers all weekend and one of the few women, argued that the European Union is not in crisis. Maybe not but if the French election puts Marine Le Pen in power, France could hold its own referendum on EU membership. Shouldn’t we be at least talking about that possible outcome now?

As for my hopes for a new and innovative format, again, the MSC delivered the status quo. To his credit, Wolfgang Ischinger – who runs the MSC– has taken steps over the years to bring the conference into the 21^st century. He added a young leaders component, created an app, added live streaming video, and made modest progress in altering the demographics of the audience. But the entire weekend is still too staged, leaving far too little time for real debate – at least on stage. The audience and speakers list continues to lack gender, age, and ethnic diversity. And the venue, which should have been declared too small years ago, continues to feel dangerously over capacity.

Would I go next year? (Maybe the more appropriate question if Wolfgang reads this is whether I’ll be invited back.) Yes, if I manage to secure an invitation in 2018, I will go back. Why? While the speeches and panels can be dry, one can vacuum up incredibly valuable insight that you simply can’t get elsewhere. Where else can you speak with the former prime minister of Sweden, the former head of the CIA, the defense minister of Norway, and two of Britain’s top journalists in the span of a 45 minute coffee break? Wolfgang has also added a number of side events that offer participants the chance to escape the crush of the 400+ people in the main hall and meet in smaller groups. This year I attended a thought provoking cyber simulation. The Atlantic Council also gave a fascinating presentation on recent events in Aleppo using some impressive digital forensics. Many of those events are worthwhile. Finally, let’s not forget it’s the charming southern Germany city of Munich. What’s not to love about Munich?

Photo credit:THOMAS KIENZLE/AFP/Getty Images

Bannon molded Breitbart into a far-right sledgehammer. How will it be wielded in the Trump era?

Breitbart started out as a small site bent on exposing the liberal bias in mainstream media. Now, its former executive, Stephen Bannon, is in the White House, and the site has begun targeting political adversaries of the Trump administration. (Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post)

By Manuel Roig-Franzia and Paul Farhi February 19 at 10:20 PM

A few days after Stephen K. Bannon was named chief strategist in President Trump’s White House, one of his best-known proteges praised him on British television.

“I am a gay Jew and he made me a star,” Milo Yiannopoulos, the frequently profane Breitbart.com columnist and cyber provocateur, told a Channel 4 interviewer in November.

Bannon molded Breitbart into a far.docx by Thavam Ratna on Scribd

Orchestrating regime change: At what price?

Regime change, rooted in the nation’s psyche, is a constant in US foreign policy regardless of who holds office.

by A G Noorani-Feb 20, 2017

Feb 20, 2017

The writer is an author and lawyer based in Mumbai

( February 20, 2017, Mumbai, Sri Lanka Guardian) We have been busy in alienating the sympathies of free peoples… the rights of a power, the rights of a nation, ought not to be invaded because it happens to have the misfortune of a despotic government,” William Gladstone said in 1880. The systematic violation of these rights by the US is the cause of the turmoil Europe and West Asia face today.

In 2003, analyst William Pfaff wrote: “Choosing to invade two Islamic states, Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which was responsible for the (9/11) attacks, inflated the crisis, in the eyes of millions of Muslims, into a clash between the United States and Islamic society. The two wars did not destroy Al Qaeda… The United States is no more secure than it was before. The wars opened killing fields in two countries that no one knows how to shut down.” Since then, the US has added Libya and Syria to its list of adventures. The waves of migration that followed have fanned the flames of latent Islamophobia in the West.

This was not an aberration. It is part of the US’ psyche, its belief in “exceptionalism” and “manifest destiny”. Pfaff writes: “The American conception of Manifest Destiny, originally seen as transcontinental expansion, has been recast… as the creation of a world order that is nominally pluralistic but under ultimate American leadership — which, it is taken for granted, would be welcome to nearly all. A programme to bring the world to democracy reflects a large consensus…”

The implications of President Donald Trump’s “America First” battle cry will unfold through his policies, but its grim, ultranationalist undertones have already been revealed through his curbs on immigration.

Regime change, rooted in the nation’s psyche, is a constant in US foreign policy regardless of who holds office. Barack Obama essentially issued a fatwa on Qadhafi in 2011; equally peremptory was his edict on Assad. During a Security Council meeting, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, aptly remarked, “Then you will start telling what king needs to resign and what Prime Minister needs to step down.”

Regime change has an ancient history, becoming en vogue in modern times as the Cold War intensified. In 1953, Operation Ajax saw the CIA overthrow the democratically elected government and reinstall the Shah of Iran. The CIA did the same with the democratically elected, leftist President of Guatemala a year later.

In the 1970s, a US Senate committee investigating intelligence activities published a report entitled Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, which stated that “on balance the likelihood that Presidents knew of the assassination plot is greater than the likelihood that they did not”. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy were heavily implicated. Targets included leaders of the Congo, Dominican Republic and South Vietnam. Famously, eight attempts were made on Fidel Castro. In 1958, a CIA-supported coup attempted to topple Indonesia’s President Sukarno. In 1972, Chile’s President Allende killed himself in the wake of a CIA-supported coup.

In 1978, Carter issued an executive order declaring that no official “shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination”. This did not deter Reagan from ordering an aerial attack on Qadhafi’s residence in 1986.

These games continued to be played with enthusiasm in recent years. The US sought to subvert Iran’s government after the Islamic Revolution — attempting to enlist its first President as an informant for $1,000 a month, as was revealed in Asnaad Lanae Jasoosi Amreeke published by Iranian students following the siege on the US embassy in Tehran in 1979. Iran survived these and worse attempts — but Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria were wrecked.

In all four cases, diplomacy was spurned in favour of the set goal of regime change. As Zbigniew Brzezinski said, 9/11 was a terrorist attack, not an act of aggression. Felix Kuehn’s book, An Enemy We Created, exposed “the myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda merger in Afghanistan”. Mullah Omar, desperately seeking a way out, needed time.

The US chose to wage war on the Afghan state, with consequences that are there for all to see. The same is true of Iraq; it is now widely accepted that the 2003 invasion has wrought ruin. Libya now has three governments, two Parliaments, three armies and 10 militias. Half of the population has emigrated. In many cases, the US relies on CIA-backed émigrés; calling the shots in Libya is Khalifa Haftar, who the CIA backed in several attempts to assassinate Qadhafi. Syria has only thwarted the US’ plans thanks to Russian support. But at what price?

The countries are a wreck, the plight of their people is miserable. The recent waves of migration have had terrible consequences. The international community must end the practice of regime change.

Marine Le Pen's Front National headquarters raided by police

French far-right party dismisses police search as ‘media operation whose goal is to disturb course of presidential campaign’

 Marine Le Pen has said she would not “submit to persecution” by repaying the money. Photograph: Wael Hamzeh/EPA

Kim Willsher in Paris-Monday 20 February 2017

French police searched the headquarters of Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front National on Monday evening as part of an official investigation into “fake” jobs involving the misuse of European Union funds to pay for a bodyguard and an assistant in Paris.

Brussels investigators claim Le Pen paid her bodyguard, Thierry Légier, more than €41,500 (£35,350) between October and December 2011, by falsely claiming he was an EU parliamentary assistant. She is also accused of paying nearly €298,000 between December 2010 and 2016 to her France-based assistant Catherine Griset.

To qualify as a parliamentary assistant, the person needs to be physically working in one of the European parliament’s three offices in Brussels, Strasbourg or Luxembourg and be resident near that workplace.

The European anti-fraud office (Olaf) has insisted Le Pen, 48, a frontrunner in France’s presidential campaign, repay the money, a total of €340,000. She has refused and is currently having it deducted from her MEP’s salary.

An FN statement claimed Monday’s raids were an attempt to “disturb the smooth running of the presidential campaign and to sink Marine Le Pen at the moment her campaign is making strides with voting intentions”.

French investigators opened a preliminary inquiry for fraud in December following Olaf’s claims and Monday’s raids on the FN officers were part of their search for evidence.

Her refusal to repay the money by the end of January deadline meant her MEP pay will be halved to around €3,000 from this month and most of her allowances and expenses frozen. In total she is expected to lose around €7,000 a month.

Le Pen said she refused to “submit to persecution”.

“I formally contest this unilateral and illegal decision taken by political opponents ... without proof and without waiting for a judgment from the court action I have started,” Le Pen told Reuters.

An opinion poll on Monday put Le Pen seven points clear of the centrist outsider Emmanuel Macron and his conservative rival François Fillon, who are tied on 20%, in the first round. But the Front National leader would lose to both Macron and Fillon in the May 7 run-off, the poll predicted, by margins of 16 and 12 points respectively.

Three other FN members of the European parliament, including Le Pen’s father and party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, have been ordered by the European court to reimburse around €600,000 of allegedly misused money.

Le Pen père has been told to repay €320,000 of salary and benefits, Bruno Gollnisch, a former academic convicted of Holocaust denial, €275,984, and MEP Mylène Troszczynski, €56,500. All three deny any wrongdoing and had challenged the reimbursement demand saying it would leave them unable to carry out their MEP duties. Last week, the court rejected their appeal and ruled the recovery of the money should go ahead.

Marine Le Pen is the second French presidential contender under investigation in “fake” jobs scandals. Centre right candidate François Fillon is facing accusations over claims he paid his British wife Penelope around €830,000 as a parliamentary assistant for more than a decade, and also paid his two eldest children Marie and Charles a total of €84,000 as assistants while he was a senator. French MPs and senators are allowed to employ family members, as long as the person is genuinely employed. Anti-fraud police are now looking into what, if anything, Penelope Fillon did.

After the Fillon scandal broke in January, Fillon said he would stand down if he was charged with an offence. However, last week, after the financial court refused to drop the case, Fillon appeared to backtrack on this pledge, saying he would continue to run and allow the “universal electorate” to decide.

Monday’s raids on the FN offices at Nanterre, just outside Paris, came as Le Pen was trying to raise her international profile with a two-day visit to Lebanon, where she reiterated her pro-Syria regime stance. Le Pen, who is running on an anti-immigration, anti-European platform said the only “viable and workable solution” to the Syrian civil war was the choice of either Bashar al-Assad or Islamic State.

“I clearly explained that in the political picture, the least bad option is the politically realistic one. It appears that Bashar al-Assad is evidently the most reassuring solution for France,” she said.

Associated Press reported that a summary of Le Pen’s meeting with the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, showed he had objected to what he saw as Le Pen’s stigmatisation of Muslims.

“Muslims are the first victims [of terrorism],” he was reported as saying adding that moderate Muslims were the “first bulwark against extremism”.

“The worst mistake would be the amalgam between Islam and Muslims on one hand and terrorism on the other,” he added, according to AP.

Le Pen was the second French presidential candidate to travel to Lebanon, following former Socialist minister Emmanuel Macron’s visit in January.

Oil rises in thin trade, but swelling U.S. output caps rally

A natural gas flare on an oil well pad burns as the sun sets outside Watford City, North Dakota January 21, 2016. REUTERS/Andrew Cullen

By Devika Krishna Kumar | NEW YORK-Tue Feb 21, 2017 

Oil prices inched higher on Monday, as investor optimism over the effectiveness of producer cuts encouraged record bets on a sustained rally, although growing U.S. output and stubbornly high stockpiles kept price gains in check.

Top OPEC exporter Saudi Arabia's crude oil shipments fell in December to 8.014 million barrels per day (bpd) from 8.258 million bpd in November, official data showed on Monday.

Brent futures LCOc1 ended the session up 0.7 percent at $56.18 a barrel.

U.S. futures West Texas Intermediate crude CLc1 gained about 29 cents or 0.5 percent to $53.69 prior to the close of trade at 1 p.m. EST, an hour and a half early due to the Presidents Day holiday.

Trading volume in Brent averaged about 181,000 lots of 1,000 barrels each, below the average of about 205,000. Volumes in U.S. crude also dipped, with just over a couple of thousand lots traded, a day ahead of the expiration of WTI futures for delivery in March. On average, more than 300,000 U.S. crude lots trade in a typical trading session.

Prices received a lift from a weaker dollar .DXY as well. A strong greenback typically makes oil more expensive for holders of other currencies.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and other producers, including Russia, agreed last year to cut output by almost 1.8 million bpd during the first half of 2017.

Estimates indicate compliance with the cuts is around 90 percent. Reuters reported last week that OPEC could extend the pact or apply deeper cuts from July if global crude inventories fail to drop enough.

Investors have certainly taken OPEC members at their word on their commitment to cut production and now hold more crude futures and options than at any time on record. [CFTC/] [O/ICE]

However, the December Saudi figures may not reflect the full picture, analysts said.

"Ahead of the agreed production cuts, Saudi Arabia had chosen not to reduce its output as it normally would have in the winter half year, so as to be able at a later date to make this appear part of the agreed reduction in production," Commerzbank said in a note.

"Presumably the decrease in production and exports in December should be seen against this backdrop, and could already have been undertaken to pre-empt the production cuts due to take force from January."

Signs of rising output in the United States have tempered money managers' appetite to push prices higher. Since the start of the month oil prices have gained around $2.

"There is still a general consensus that the OPEC/non-OPEC agreement helps supply to get in line with demand. This bullish stance is countered by the ever-increasing inventories in the U.S. and rising rig counts," PVM Oil Associates strategist Tamas Varga said in a note.

U.S. energy companies added oil rigs for a fifth consecutive week, Baker Hughes said on Friday, extending a nine-month recovery with producers encouraged by higher prices, which have largely traded above $50 a barrel since late November. [RIG/U]

"Assuming the U.S. oil rig count stays at the current level, we estimate U.S. oil production would increase by 405,000 (barrels per day) between fourth-quarter 2017 and fourth-quarter 2016 across the Permian, Eagle Ford, Bakken and Niobrara shale plays," Goldman Sachs said in a research note.

"Annual average U.S. production would increase by 130,000 bpd year over year on average in 2017."

(Additional reporting by Amanda Cooper in London, Henning Gloystein in SINGAPORE and Aaron Sheldrick in TOKYO; Editing by Alan Crosby and Matthew Lewis)