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Prime Minister Boris Johnson will on Wednesday unveil his final Brexit offer to the European Union and make clear that if Brussels does not engage with the proposal, Britain will not negotiate further and will leave on Oct. 31.In his closing speech to his governing Conservatives’ annual conference, Johnson will stick to his hard line on Brexit, offering the party faithful the first details of what he will describe as his “fair and reasonable compromise.”With less than a month until Britain is due to leave the EU, the future of Brexit, the country’s biggest trade and foreign policy shift in more than 40 years, is uncertain. Britain could leave with a deal, without one or not exit at all.Johnson, who says Britain will leave the bloc on Oct. 31 no matter what, will tell the conference he will send his proposal to Brussels on Wednesday, an attempt to secure a deal to smooth the country’s departure and avoid a potentially economically damaging no-deal Brexit.”My friends, I am afraid that after three-and-a-half years people are beginning to feel that they are being taken for fools. They are beginning to suspect that there are forces in this country that simply don’t want Brexit delivered at all,” he will say, according to extracts released by his office. “Let’s get Brexit done on October 31 so in 2020 our country can move on.”Delegates arrive in heavy rain at the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, England, Oct. 1, 2019.More than three years after Britain voted to leave the EU in a 2016 referendum, Brexit talks are at an impasse.Johnson has been firm that the Oct. 31 deadline will be met, but parliament has put roadblocks in his way — passing a law that requires the prime minister to request a Brexit delay if he fails to secure an acceptable deal at an EU summit on Oct. 17.The EU has repeatedly asked Britain to come up with “legal and operational” proposals for the changes Johnson wants to a deal his predecessor negotiated with the bloc last year.”Nobody Will Work on a Delay”Following its rejection three times by parliament, Johnson has demanded changes to the Withdrawal Agreement, especially over arrangements for a new border with the bloc between the British province of Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland.But after weeks of talks since Johnson took power that have made little headway to break the Brexit stand-off, the prime minister will make his last gambit — a new proposal which British officials describe as the final offer.”The government is either going to be negotiating a new deal or working on no deal — nobody will work on delay,” a senior government official said.”We will keep fighting to respect the biggest democratic vote in British history. The EU is obliged by EU law only to negotiate with member state governments, they cannot negotiate with parliament, and this government will not negotiate delay.”Johnson has made the gamble that by pressing a hardline position on Brexit he will steal votes from parties such as the Brexit Party led by veteran eurosceptic Nigel Farage at an election, widely expected to come before the end of the year.He also has the main opposition Labour Party in his sights, and will use his speech to attack its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who has led efforts to try to stop the prime minister taking Britain out of the EU without a deal.”Can you imagine another three years of this? That is the Corbyn agenda — stay in the EU beyond October 31, paying 1 billion pounds ($1.23 billion) a month for the privilege, followed by years of uncertainty for business and everyone else,” he will say. “That is why we are coming out of the EU on October 31. Let’s get Brexit done – we can, we must and we will.”($1 = 0.8123 pounds) 
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Voters in Kosovo will pick a new parliament on Sunday in a snap election dominated by rampant corruption, sky-high unemployment and poor relations with neighboring Serbia that it must try to mend if it is to move closer towards eventual EU membership.Kosovo has Europe’s youngest population, with an average age of 29, and has seen annual economic growth averaging 4% over the past decade, but it remains very poor and more than 200,000 Kosovars have left and applied for asylum in the European Union since Pristina won its independence from Belgrade in 2008.The election was triggered by the resignation of Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj in July after he was summoned for questioning by the war crimes prosecutor in The Hague over his role in the 1998-99 insurgency against Serb forces.Albin Kurti, leader of the Self-Determination movement (Vetevendosje), attends a campaign rally in Mitrovica, Kosovo, Sept. 25, 2019.Public dissatisfaction with the record of his three-party governing coalition has boosted support for opposition parties, with the center-right Democratic League for Kosovo (LDK) and the nationalist, left-leaning Vetevendosje vying for first place.The LDK’s candidate for prime minister, Vjosa Osmani, said she believed Kosovars were now ready to be led by a woman for the first time.”In more than 90 percent of cases it is men who are involved in corruption. A woman sees the state and how to take care of our citizens completely differently,” Osmani told Reuters.Educated in the United States, the 37-year-old law professor represents a younger generation of Kosovars more familiar with life in the West and deeply frustrated with the nepotism and ineffectiveness of the tiny Balkan nation’s traditional parties.‘It cannot get any worse’Her campaign slogan is “believe!” but voters are skeptical about politicians’ promises in a country where more than a third of people are unemployed and getting a well-paid job usually requires hard cash or political connections.”To get a job you need to bribe someone or know the right officials,” said Lindita Azemi, 22, who earns less than 300 euros a month cooking up hamburgers at a local shop despite having a degree in political science and public administration.Echoing that note of disillusionment, Ramadan Bibaj, 66, said: “Whoever wins, it cannot get any worse than this.””Politicians became very rich and now they don’t want to know about the people. Within five years fewer than 400,000 people will remain here (if things continue like this)” he said.Kosovo’s population now stands at 1.8 million.Both Osmani and her main rival, Vetevendosje leader Albin Kurti, are trying to tap into the public anger over graft.While Osmani favors free market reforms, Kurti advocates a sovereign fund to rebuild state-owned firms in key sectors. But both remain opposed to making territorial concessions to Serbia — one option proposed for reviving stalled talks on normalizing bilateral relations.Predominantly Albanian Kosovo declared independence in 2008, nearly a decade after NATO bombing drove Serb security forces out of what was then a Serbian province. In 2013, Kosovo and Serbia agreed to EU-sponsored talks, but little progress has been made since.Kosovo’s independence has been recognized by more than 110 states but not by others, including five EU member states, as well as Serbia, Russia and China.Under its constitution, Serbia considers Kosovo part of its territory. Pristina has imposed a 100% tax on Serbian imports and says it will only scrap it after Belgrade recognizes Kosovo as a sovereign state.Opinion polls predict no party gaining enough support to form a government on its own after Sunday’s election, and lengthy coalition talks are expected.
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More than 1,000 migrants and refugees have died in the Mediterranean Sea this year, the sixth year in a row that this “bleak milestone” has been reached, the United Nations said on Tuesday.The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR called for European Union (EU) member states to reactivate search and rescue operations and acknowledge the crucial role of aid groups’ vessels in saving lives at sea.”The tragedy of the Mediterranean cannot be allowed to continue,” Charlie Yaxley, spokesman of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said in a statement.The bodies of five migrants were found on Morocco’s Atlantic coast near Casablanca on Monday, bringing to 12 the number killed when their boat capsized on Saturday, the state news agency reported.The EU struck a deal with Ankara in 2016 to cut off refugee and migrant flows to Greece from Turkey. Departures, now also diverted largely via Libya and other parts of North Africa, have fallen sharply from a peak of more than 1 million in 2015 to some 78,000 so far this year, UNHCR figures show.”Of course the number of people attempting to cross the Mediterranean are much lower. So, that points to the fact that the journeys themselves are much more dangerous,” UNHCR spokeswoman Liz Throssell told Reuters Television.”It is also worth highlighting that 70 percent of the deaths actually occur on the central Mediterranean, namely people attempting to get from Libya across to Italy or Malta.”More than 18,000 people have lost their lives inMediterranean crossings since 2014, according to figures from both the UNHCR and the website of the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM). 
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Ukraine on Tuesday signed much-anticipated accords with separatists from the country’s east, Russia and European monitors that agree a local election can be held in separatist-controlled territory, paving the way for peace talks with Moscow.The signing at a meeting in the Belarusian capital of Minsk was largely seen as the new Ukrainian government taking a major step toward resolving the prolonged armed conflict in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 13,000 people and displaced more than 1 million since 2014.Ukrainian nationalists protested the development, with hundreds gathering on Kyiv’s Maidan, the square that symbolizes Ukraine’s resistance to Russian influence.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said at a briefing in Kyiv that the country agreed to a snap local election in the east, which has been controlled by Russia-backed separatists since April 2014. He sought to dispel fears about excessive concessions to the separatists, saying the election would be held only when Ukraine regains control of all its borders with Russia.“There won’t be any elections under the barrel of a gun,” Zelenskiy said in response to criticism that his administration bowed to Russia’s demands. “There won’t be any elections there if the troops are still there.”Separatist leaders and the Ukrainian government also pledged to pull back troops from two locations in the Donetsk and the Luhansk regions early next week.Zelenskiy insisted the local election would be held according to Ukrainian law, meaning all candidates and political parties should be allowed to run. Separatist leaders have rejected that idea in the past, saying they wouldn’t allow Ukrainian parties that included nationalist politicians to run.Both the separatists and Ukraine agreed the election will be considered valid as long as monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe determine they are free and fair, Zelenskiy said.The Kremlin has denied providing military or financial support to the separatists despite overwhelming evidence. Russian troops were spotted in eastern Ukraine during crucial offensives, and the rebels themselves don’t make it a secret they received weapons and training from the Russian military.Moscow has tried to play down its involvement in eastern Ukraine in recent years, pulling back its troops and mostly relying on proxy forces. The separatists, in the meantime, re-branded their fighters as police or other law enforcement officers.The election agreement was seen as the final hurdle before a summit between Zelenskiy, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of France and Germany, who have helped mediate the peace talks. French President Emmanuel Macro said earlier Tuesday that he expects the summit in the coming weeks.Russia previously declined to sit down with Ukraine unless it signed an agreement on holding a local election.Former Ukrainian officials and lawmakers who were voted out of office earlier this year following a landslide victory by Zelenskiy and his allies expressed concern Tuesday that Kyiv was giving up its sovereignty over the east by signing the accords.Former parliamentary speaker Andriy Parubiy, in a Facebook post on Tuesday, slammed the plan for a local election as “an attempt to dismantle the Ukrainian state” and pledged to fight against what he described as “capitulation.”Parubiy’s supporters and other nationalist activists gathered outside the Ukrainian presidential administration late Tuesday to protest the agreement, later moving to the Maidan. Some held a banner saying “No to capitulation!” Police stood watch.In Moscow, officials and pro-Kremlin politicians welcomed the accords.Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the information committee in the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, hailed the agreement as “our major achievement” and expressed hope that the four-way summit, the first one to be held since 2016, “could lead to a noticeable progress in (our) relations with Europe.”Moscow’s recent outreach to Kyiv was seen as Russia’s attempt to get the European nations to roll back at least some of the sanctions that were imposed on Russia in the aftermath of the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the start of the conflict in eastern Ukra
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Vatican police raided the offices of the Holy See’s Secretariat of State and its Financial Information Authority, or AIF, on Tuesday and took away documents and electronic devices as part of an investigation of suspected financial irregularities, a Vatican statement said.It was believed to be the first time the two departments were searched for evidence involving alleged financial crimes.The Secretariat of State, the most powerful department in the Vatican, is the nerve center of its bureaucracy and diplomacy and the administrative heart of the worldwide Catholic Church.The AIF, headed by Swiss lawyer Rene Bruelhart, is the financial controller, with authority over all Vatican departments.The Vatican statement gave no details except to say that the operation was a follow-up to complaints filed in the summer by the Vatican bank and the Office of the Auditor General and were related to “financial operations carried out over the course of time.”A senior Vatican source said he believed the operation, which the statement said had been authorized by Vatican prosecutors, had to do with real estate transactions.Since the election of Pope Francis in 2013, the Vatican has made great strides in cleaning up its often murky financial reputation.Last year, a former head of the Vatican bank and an Italian lawyer went on trial to face charges of money laundering and embezzlement through real estate deals. It is still in progress.In May, the AIF said reports of suspicious financial activity in the Vatican reached a six-year low in 2018, continuing a trend officials said showed reforms were in place.For decades, the bank, officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion, or IOR, was embroiled in numerous financial scandals as Italians with no right to have accounts opened them with the complicity of corrupt insiders.Hundreds of accounts have been closed at the IOR, whose stated purpose is to manage funds for the Church, Vatican employees, religious institutes or Catholic charities.In 2017, Italy put the Vatican on its “white list” of states with cooperative financial institutions, ending years of mistrust.The same year, Moneyval, a monitoring body of the Council of Europe, gave Vatican financial reforms a mostly positive evaluation. 
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Europe is not blameless in the trade tensions casting a pall over the global economy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, mentioning the lengthening Brexit negotiations as a source of uncertainty to stand beside the United States-China trade war.Speaking after a meeting with leaders of multilateral financial institutions on Tuesday, Merkel declined to lay the blame for the slowing global economy solely on U.S. President Donald Trump’s hard-line stance on trade with China.”We have nothing to be smug about,” she said. “We’ve been negotiating an orderly British exit for three years. And that brings us great uncertainty when you consider that that exit should happen on October 31. And people still don’t know how supply chains will look.”Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson visits Bestway Wholesale in Manchester, Britain, Sept. 30, 2019.Officials across Europe are growing increasingly concerned at the lack of progress Prime Minister Boris Johnson is making on a new deal to regulate Britain’s departure from the European Union after parliament three times rejected one negotiated by his predecessor, Theresa May.An unregulated exit would bring tariff and regulatory barriers down around Britain’s borders, disrupting industrial supply chains that have grown deeply entwined over the half-century of Britain’s membership.”That’s a significant source of uncertainty since Britain isn’t a small European country but a large global player,” Merkel added.The World Trade Organization’s head also warned that proposals for an EU-wide carbon border tax to protect Europe’s economy from being undercut by regions with lower emissions standards – an idea floated by incoming European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen – could be construed as protectionist.”It is easy to somehow introduce less legitimate, protectionist concerns on initiatives like that,” Roberto Azevedo said. “They can be very complex and very costly for businesses as well. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying let’s go carefully.”Other top international officials struck a gloomy note on the prospects for the global economy if the shadows cast by trade disputes continued to lengthen, with the risk of recession seemingly uppermost in some minds.”Unless trade tensions are defused it’s very hard to see mainstream macroeconomic tools countering the impact,” said David Lipton, deputy director of the International Monetary Fund.”The other question is how much the world economy can go even further down,” said Angel Gurria, head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. “I don’t want to mention the ‘R’ word (but) if we continue the escalation…” 
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Four European Union nations are proposing a “fast-track system” for getting migrants off boats in trouble in the Mediterranean Sea and the asylum-seekers on board divided among countries willing to take them.A statement obtained by European civil liberties watchdog Statewatch says Germany, France, Italy and Malta foresee a process that would screen migrants, relocate asylum-seekers and return those who don’t qualify or never applied for protection — all within four weeks.
 
The Associated Press confirmed the statement’s authenticity on Tuesday. The sponsoring nations plan to seek approval from other EU members next week.
 
The document says EU members prepared to take in asylum-seekers and handle their applications would make “pre-declared pledges” of some kind.
 
It says the EU would provide “financial, technical and operational assistance” to those countries.  
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Denmark’s largest bank says its Estonian branch, which was involved in a 200 billion-euro ($220 billion) money laundering scandal, has entered liquidation after winding down banking activities in the Baltic country.
 
Frederik Bjoern, Danske Bank’s chairman of the liquidation committee, said Tuesday it “has now essentially closed all banking activities in Estonia,” as agreed with the Estonian financial watchdog in February.
 
The money laundering scandal is one of the largest of its kind. It involved dirty money being funneled from 2007 to 2015 mainly from Russia and other former Soviet republics to client accounts of the Estonian bank subsidiary.
 
Last week, Estonian police found the body of Aivar Rehe, Danske Bank’s head in Estonia in 2006-2015, and confirmed Monday he had committed suicide. He was never considered a suspect. 
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Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy lost a final court appeal Tuesday against an order that he stand trial on charges of illegal financing for his 2012 election campaign.Sarkozy, who already faces a separate trial for corruption involving a judge, is accused of spending nearly double the legal limit of 22.5 million euros ($24.5 million) on his failed re-election bid.France’s highest criminal appeal court rejected his attempt to avoid facing the charges, paving the way for a trial date to be set after multiple challenges by Sarkozy’s legal team.Prosecutors claim the 64-year-old Sarkozy, who has spent the past few years fighting a barrage of corruption and campaign financing charges, spent nearly 43 million euros on his quest for a second term.In the end, he was beaten by the Socialist Party’s Francois Hollande.Investigators claim that Sarkozy’s campaign used fake invoices to get around the campaign spending limits.Sarkozy has rejected the charges, saying he was unaware of the fraud by executives at the public relations firm Bygmalion.He faces a year in prison and a fine of 3,750 euros if convicted.Thirteen other people, including a number of Bygmalion executives, have also been charged in the case.     
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British-registered companies have facilitated North Korean efforts to evade international sanctions, according to an investigation by the London-based Royal United Services Institute. The report reveals how British companies are being used to operate cargo ships smuggling coal out of North Korea. Henry Ridgwell has more from London.
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