The Times - UK (2020-07-31)

the times | Friday July 31 2020 2GM 29

The World at Five

Britain refuses to release its

grip on last African colony

In depth and online today at 5pm

thetimes.co.uk

advocate of voting rights and a contemporary of Martin Luther King, lay in state in Atlanta before his funeral yesterday

Russian mercenaries linked to the

Kremlin were plotting with opposition

politicians to cause unrest in Belarus, it

was alleged yesterday, in a claim that

looked like an attempt to keep the man

dubbed Europe’s last dictator in power.

Belarusian special forces seized 32

alleged fighters from the Wagner bat-

talion in a raid at a sanatorium near

Minsk on Wednesday. Another man

was held in the south of the country.

Belarus’s Investigative Committee

said the authorities had opened crimi-

nal cases against “Tikhanovsky, Stat-

kevich and 33 detained Russian citi-

zens”. Sergei Tikhanovsky, 41, and Mi-

kola Statkevich, 63, are opponents of

President Lukashenko. Both are in jail

on dubious charges. Critics said that Mr

Lukashenko was trying to smear the

opposition by linking the men with a

fabricated plot before presidential elec-

tions on August 9.

Mr Tikhanovsky, a blogger, had been

due to run against Mr Lukashenko, 65.

The president’s most popular opponent

is now Mr Tikhanovsky’s wife, Svetlana

Tikhanovskaya, 38. She has attracted

large rallies, rattling Mr Lukashenko,

who has been in power since 1994. Tens

of thousands of people gathered in

Minsk last night in the biggest opposi-

tion rally in a decade.

Yesterday Ms Tikhanovskaya re-

fused to take part in a televised debate

with two minor candidates, instead

offering Mr Lukashenko a “duel”.

Earlier yesterday officials in Minsk

had said the Wagner mercenaries were

suspected of planning a destabilising

terrorism campaign in Belarus. The

Wagner battalion is thought to be fin-

anced by Yevgeny Prigozhin, 59, a Rus-

sian businessman known as “Putin’s

chef” for his Kremlin catering con-

tracts. Wagner has become notorious

for its role in war zones where Russia

has interests, such as Syria and Libya.

Belarus published a list of the

detained men’s names and multiple

sources confirmed that they were Wag-

Europe’s last despot

links seized Russian

fighters to ‘coup plot’

ner fighters. Mr Lukashenko demand-

ed an explanation from Moscow. How-

ever, footage of the men’s possessions

showed Sudanese currency and a Suda-

nese phone card, suggesting that the

mercenaries may have been heading to

Africa, not planning trouble in Belarus.

Zakhar Prilepin, 45, a Russian writer

who fought for pro-Russian separatists

in eastern Ukraine, said that several of

the men were former comrades who

had joined Wagner. Mr Prilepin said

that the men had been using Belarus as

a transit point because flights from

Moscow had been halted because of the

pandemic. Another source said the

men were headed for Africa.

Russia’s ambassador to Belarus said

last night that the men were en route to

Istanbul but missed a connection.

Wagner mercenaries have been most

prominent in Syria fighting alongside

Russian troops for President Assad.

They are also active in Africa as

Moscow tries to win contracts for its

companies to exploit deposits of dia-

monds, gold and oil.

Fighters from the group were spotted

in Sudan last year in an apparent de-

ployment in support of President al-

Bashir, a dictator who was deposed

months later and is wanted by the Inter-

national Criminal Court for alleged war

crimes and genocide in western Darfur.

The Kremlin denies knowledge of

Wagner, despite Dmitry Utkin, its com-

mander, being photographed next to

President Putin in 2016. Dmitry Peskov,

Mr Putin’s spokesman, said the claims

of a Russian plan to disrupt Belarus

were “insinuations” and that no evi-

dence of a crime had been presented.

Andrei Sannikov, 66, a former Bela-

rusian presidential candidate and critic

of Mr Lukashenko, alleged that the

mercenaries’ arrest was a “spectacle”

agreed with Russia. The idea was to

extract financial support from the West

that Mr Putin was no longer prepared

to give to Belarus, he suggested.

Mr Lukashenko had warned of Rus-

sian and Polish attempts to upset the

election and alleged that opposition

figures were puppets of foreign powers.

Belarus

Tom Parfitt Moscow

JESSICA MCGOWAN/GETTY IMAGES

Jews who paid Nazi fares’

transporting Jews to their death. In the

letter to Mrs Merkel, Axel Hagedorn,

Mr Muller’s lawyer, said that the federal

German state was legally responsible.

“The state is a one hundred per cent

shareholder in the railways. Germany’s

moral responsibility always remains,”

he wrote.

Deutsche Bahn, which was created in

1994 after German reunification,

denies legal responsibility but has con-

tributed a “considerable double-digit-

million sum” to the country’s Holocaust

foundation, which administers com-

pensation to victims of the Nazis.

“Even though Deutsche Bahn is not

the legal successor to the Deutsche

Reichsbahn it is aware of its historical

responsibility,” a spokesman said. In

Britain Deutsche Bahn owns Arriva,

the bus and train company.

The German government has prom-

ised to examine all individual cases as

part of the country’s worldwide com-

pensation payments.

A spokesman for Mrs Merkel said:

“We will never forget the crimes com-

mitted by Germans during the Second

World War. They still fill us today with

great dismay and shame.”

In 1941 Mr Muller’s parents, Lena and

Louis, were arrested by the SS while he

was at school. They were transported

by rail from Amsterdam to the Dutch

transit camp Westerbork before being

taken on to their death in Auschwitz

by German trains. He survived after

being hidden for the duration of the war

by eight families linked to the Dutch

resistance.

“I can’t give up because this hurts me

every day,” he said. “Every day I have to

think about this and it hurts me. And I

want that pain to finally pass.”

published this month in Nature Materi-

als, could have applications for robotics

and personal protective equipment.

“Materials that undergo continual

repetitive motion often develop tiny

tears and cracks that can

expand, leading to cata-

strophic failure,” said

Stephanie McElhin-

ny, a biochemistry

programme man-

ager at the US

Army Research

Office.

“With a self-

healing bio-based

synthetic material,

any sites of damage

that emerge can be

repaired, extending

the lifetime of the

system or device.”

University and the Max Planck Insti-

tute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart,

performed the same trick with the

application of heat and water or light.

“We were able to reduce a typical 24-

hour healing period to one

second, so our protein-

based soft robots can

now repair them-

selves immediately,”

Abdon Pena-Fran-

cesch, of the Max

Planck Institute

said. “In nature,

self-healing takes

a long time. In this

sense, our techno-

logy outsmarts na-

ture.” Their findings,

Squid teeth to help make self-repair suits

Will Pavia New York

The suckers at the end of a squid’s tenta-

cles are barbed with serrated rings like

circular jaws that allow it to grip hold of

the fish and shrimp on which it preys.

Besides resembling, in close up, a clip

from a horror film, the “squid teeth

rings” have an inbuilt repair system that

allows them to regenerate when

broken. They are now at the centre of a

project funded by the US Army

Research Institute to develop self-

-repairing materials that might be used

in hazmat suits and robotic machines.

Scientists have developed a polymer

that mimics the process over 24 hours

in which soft parts of the proteins in the

teeth rings are said to help the broken

pieces fuse together, while harder parts

reinforce the structure. The polymer,

created by scientists at Penn State

tears and c

expand, l

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Scientists copied how a

squid repairs its suckers