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Added on the 18/06/2020 14:00:00 - Copyright : EFE Inglés
Geneva (Switzerland), 18 June, EFE, (Camera: Antonio Broto).- The number of refugees and displaced people in the world increased in 2019 to 79.5 million people, according to the annual report released on Wednesday. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, discusses the details in an interview with Efe.FOOTAGE OF PART ONE OF AN EFE INTERVIEW WITH FILIPPO GRANDI, UNITED NATIONS HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR REFUGEES
Moscow, Nov 5 (EFE), (Camera: Céline Aemisegger).- Azerbaijan will stop the war in Nagorno-Karabakh immediately if Armenia withdraws and its prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, personally and publicly announces his retreat and defeat, the Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev told Efe in an interview.In power since 2003, the Azeri head of state spoke to Efe via videolink from one of the rooms in the presidential palace in Baku. His demeanor is one of defiance. He claims that Azerbaijan has a clear military advantage over Armenia in conflict over the territory, which is internationally-recognized as belonging to Azerbaijan, although is populated predominantly by Armenians. SOUNDBITES OF AZERBAIJAN'S PRESIDENT ILHAM ALIYEV DURING AN INTERVIEW WITH EFE.
Rome, Apr 17, EFE, (Camera: Álvaro Caballero).- Few know more about confinement than Roberto Saviano, the Italian journalist and writer who has dedicated his life to investigating the mafia and who has lived with a bodyguard for 14 years, ever since he was sentenced to death by the Camorra after the publication of "Gomorra". In a conversation with EFE, he reflects on the reality of confinement in the face of the coronavirus crisis, on his life experience and the growing power of the mafias taking advantage of this situation of weakness.SAVIANO'S SOUNDBITE TRANSLATIONS:1- "I'm in Brooklyn. I am in quarantine like everyone else and, seeing the world from here is - truly particular: it shows all the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. The workers that society needs most are living in a situation of economic degradation...". 2- "The quarantine has surprised me here. I usually come and go, I had planned to return to Italy but I couldn't. Besides, I've been living in prison for 15 years now, so at the beginning, it wasn't a strong psychological impact, then it was...". 3- "On the one hand, it has been an individual response which is: now you can understand how painful the situation of being locked up at home is. On the other hand, it's very different, because when you're locked up for safety... In my life, I have been locked up for four months and three weeks without ever getting out, for security, for almost 15 years now and then for some months I got out little, my life was like that. But the life that goes on, it doesn't stop. Today instead the external life slows down, blocked, so that your loneliness is shared loneliness. On the other hand, the enemy is invisible, while my enemy was visible, although he did not let himself be caught, he was untraceable, but he was visible. 4- "It is much more difficult, the mind is always distracted, the concern for family, which is all over Italy. People tell you that you can read a lot, but I read much less than I usually do, with my head always busy. You also have to read a lot of nonsense about the Coronavirus, but you have to follow it because you think, perhaps irrationally, that an ability to orient yourself can be born from this knowledge, but instead, it only increases the confusion. 5- "A huge impact. It's already happening. Think that from Mexico where the Cartels are doing the shopping, the families... Information is obtained by calling the police, it's simple. The police in many places have this information. The real welfare of the borders is being caused by criminal organizations. 6- "Now all the drug trafficking is paralyzed in the streets. Paralyzed in the streets but flourishing in the ports. Traffic has clearly increased. For example, all police action against money laundering is at a standstill at the moment, formally stopped. In Italy, the investigation of financial flows, how they move... This is not possible because it is necessary to allow the forces of law and order to deal with other things. Drugs continue to be sold door to door by drug dealers, but it is difficult because the streets are so tightly controlled. The ports are full, but the real profit is in the economic activities, which will come. Imagine something simple: in small companies, 5 restaurants, the tobacconists and midsize companies do not have more money. The mafias are coming, not that they are coming with the face of a mafioso, on the contrary. They come, they give you money in the name of a company and they buy options, keeping a part of your company. They become partners. And that's how they'll get into all the companies, in Spain, in Italy, in Greece, in Albania, in South America. In Northern Europe of course, but Northern Europe has never stopped being like that. I am amazed at Germany, which thinks it is immune to this story and it is not. They think they are immune because they don't know the instruments, the amount of mafia money that has gone in. 7- "Germany is one of the countries with more risk, because it does not observe its flows, there is a lack of control. It is a country without the crime of mafia association, without the crime of external participation in mafia association... If a professional works with crime he is not prosecuted or has little chance of being sentenced to heavy penalties (...) because in Germany and throughout Europe, as in Spain, there is actually little blood on the streets and this has led to less need for intervention. But Spain is much more advanced than Germany, much more in the fight against the mafia, because it has understood that collaboration with the Italian anti-mafia institutions also protected the Spanish economy. In short, the most unprotected country at this time in the West is Germany. 8- "In usury, at this time by order of the clans, they are not charging interest, if they give you 1000 euros, you give them 1000 euros, because in exchange they will ask for other things: votes, aid, agreements of criminal organizations... It is in the long term, based on the fact that social support from criminal organisations is much stronger than state assistance. But it is an assistance that you pay for with blood, it is not state solidarity that you receive by right, but you will pay for it somehow, you will have to pay it back. The other strategy is to buy at home. They send you food directly, which is a mechanism they use continuously in election campaigns. In election campaigns, the pre-elected candidate sends the food.
Rome, Apr 17, EFE, (Camera: Álvaro Caballero).- Few know more about confinement than Roberto Saviano, the Italian journalist and writer who has dedicated his life to investigating the mafia and who has lived with a bodyguard for 14 years, ever since he was sentenced to death by the Camorra after the publication of "Gomorra". In a conversation with EFE, he reflects on the reality of confinement in the face of the coronavirus crisis, on his life experience and the growing power of the mafias taking advantage of this situation of weakness.SAVIANO'S SOUNDBITE TRANSLATIONS:1- "Companies that wash hospital sheets. Companies that supply ambulances. Funeral parlours. Food distribution. What does all this mean? That they are already winning because they have invested in sectors that are on an incredible rise."2- "With the pandemic, things are changing. With the pandemic, they realize that with relatively minimal investment... For example, with 50,000 euros of shopping bags they give people for a month, they have the whole neighbourhood with them, instantly. Before the effort was much more burdensome, it had to be more important."3- "The truth is that the answer is completely trite: money. They must give money. There is no other immediate answer. Access to funds and allow companies and individuals not to sell their lives, not to be forced to resort to any economic model of survival".4- "Everything. They have done everything wrong. The red zone with delay. The management of the sick who have wanted to be sent to the nursing home, probably for interest, for money. They probably imagined that in the nursing homes it was not as deadly of an epidemic as it, unfortunately, is, especially for certain people. So Lombardy has seen its system of efficiency born of the balance between the public and the private fail. Lombardy, which has always been ruled by the League and the reactionary right-wing has always made propaganda saying that the Lombard public health system was the best in the world. Obviously, the situation has shown that the reality is quite different. 5- "The crime that Viktor Orban has done, is a crime. He has ended Parliament with an authoritarian operation, taking advantage of it as all military and authoritarian regimes have done". 6- "Orban is the first dictatorship within Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The authoritarian risk is enormous, because the pandemic creates the state of exception, and the state of exception dispenses with democratic rules and initiates what these political groups have been seeking for years, a single guide, a single direction, a single power'. 7- "Very fragile, very fragile. Europe seems dead with the COVID. Now they are trying to straighten out the course. Europe has only two possibilities, either to refound itself exactly as the founding fathers imagined it to be, a United States of Europe, or to die. Because if you consider the pandemic to be a purely Italian or Spanish or Portuguese problem, you are delirious, it is not. 8- "In general, after pandemics, there are no attacks of solidarity, of trust towards others. Because while after a war with the other you are at peace, because there has been a peace treaty, of negotiation, with the other you feel repaired, because there are no more uniforms, there is no order to charge or shoot. The other is no longer your enemy because there has been a formal halt that has closed the conflict. Not with the pandemic, because the others are still dangerous, because mismanagement could infect you, or you could infect another. Even if the pandemic ends, or there is a cure or vaccine, the suspicion remains. The distance between us, politically or socially, we can resolve, but culturally it is a very long way away. 9- "It would be enough for me to go out a little bit again to recover, like everyone else, a little bit of the measure of a life in which you do not feel completely imprisoned. Having said that, nostalgia is the greatest internal danger, and I have not managed to live well with nostalgia. For many it is a resource, for me, it is a continuous trap. Because nostalgia grips you, it deforms what you've lived through, you've probably lived through things with normal intensity and nostalgia describes them to you as moments of happiness, of great vital intensity, of pleasure. 10- "Especially trying not to lengthen the day, but to widen it. Live everything with more intensity, the music you listen to, the book you read, give it as much time as you can without being distracted".
U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte goes on Brazilian TV to apologize, saying the country "doesn't deserve" the bad publicity that resulted when he claimed he had been robbed at gunpoint, something he now says he "over-exaggerated." Rough Cut (no reporter narration).
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