The song “Baby Shark” blared over loudspeakers and a wave of red washed across this politically blue capital Saturday as Nationals fans rejoiced at a parade marking Washington’s first World Series victory since 1924. 

“They say good things come to those who wait. Ninety-five years is a pretty long wait,” Nationals owner Ted Lerner told the cheering crowd. “But I’ll tell you, this is worth the wait.” 

As buses carrying the players and team officials wended their way along the parade route, pitcher Max Scherzer at one point hoisted the World Series trophy to the cheers of the crowd. 

At a rally just blocks from the Capitol, Scherzer said that early in the season his teammates battled hard to “stay in the fight.” And then, after backup outfielder Gerardo Parra joined the team, he said, they started dancing and having fun. And they started hitting. “Never in this town have you seen a team compete with so much heart and so much fight,” he said. 

And then the Nats danced. 

‘I trusted these guys’

Team officials, Nationals manager Dave Martinez and several players thanked the fans for their support through the best of times and staying with them even after a dismal 19-31 start to the season. “I created the circle of trust and I trusted these guys,” Martinez said. 

The camaraderie among the players was a theme heard throughout the rally. “It took all 25 of us. Every single day we were pulling for each other,” said pitcher Stephen Strasburg, named the World Series’ Most Valuable Player. 

Veteran slugger Howie Kendrick, 36, said that when he came to the Nationals in 2017, “I was thinking about retiring. This city taught me to love baseball again.” 

Mayor Muriel Bowser declared D.C. the “District of Champions.” The Capitals won Stanley Cup in 2018, the Mystics won the WNBA championship this year, and now the Nationals are baseball’s best. 

The Nationals won the best-of-seven series against the Houston Astros, with the clincher coming on the road Wednesday night. 

“I just wish they could have won in D.C.,” said Ronald Saunders of Washington, who came with a Little League team that was marching in the parade. 

Nick Hashimoto of Dulles, Virginia, was among those who arrived at 5 a.m. to snag a front-row spot for the parade. He brought his own baby shark toy in honor of Parra’s walk-up song, which began as a parental tribute to the musical taste of his 2-year-old daughter and ended up as a rallying cry that united fans at Nationals Park and his teammates. 

As “Baby Shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo” played on a crisp morning, early risers joined in with the trademark response — arms extended in a chomping motion. Chants of “Let’s go, Nats!” resonated from the crowd hours before the rally. 

‘Fight Finished’

A packed crowd lined the parade route. Cheers went up and fans waved red streamers, hand towels and signs that said “Fight Finished” as the players rode by on the open tops of double-decker buses. General Manager Mike Rizzo, a cigar in his mouth, jumped off with the World Series trophy to show the fans lining the barricades and slap high-fives.  

“We know what this title means to D.C., a true baseball town, from the Senators to the Grays and now the Nationals,” Bowser said at the rally. “By finishing the fight you have brought a tremendous amount of joy to our town and inspired a new generation of players and Nationals fans.” 

Bowser added: “We are deeply proud of you and I think we should do it again next year. What do you think?” Then she started a chant of “Back to back! Back to back!” 

Martinez said he liked to hear the mayor pushing for back-to-back championships and said: “I get it. I’m all in. But let me enjoy this one first. I don’t know if my heart can take any more of this right now. I need to just step back and enjoy this.” 

Martinez, who underwent a heart procedure recently, said that during the series, as things heated up, players and fans shouted at him to watch out for his heart. “All this right here has cured my heart,” he said. 

And as the “Baby Shark” theme played once more, team owner Lerner told the team’s veterans, “From now on, you can call me `Grandpa Shark.’ ”   

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Thousands of Lebanese flocked together Saturday in Tripoli to keep a protest movement alive in a city dubbed “the bride of the revolution.” 

Despite its reputation for conservatism, impoverished Tripoli has emerged as a festive nerve center of anti-graft demonstrations across Lebanon since Oct. 17. 
 
The movement has lost momentum in Beirut since the government resigned this week, but in the Sunni-majority city of Tripoli late Saturday, it was still going strong. 
 
In the main square, protesters waved Lebanese flags and held aloft mobile phones as lights, before bellowing out the national anthem in unison, an AFP reporter said. 

‘Everyone’ urged to go

“Everyone means everyone,” one poster read, reiterating a common slogan calling for all political leaders from across the sectarian spectrum to step down. 
 
Many people had journeyed from other parts of the country to join in. 
 
Ragheed Chehayeb, 38, said he had driven in from the central town of Aley. 
 
“I came to Tripoli to stand by their side because they’re the only ones continuing the revolution,” he said. 
 
Leila Fadl, 50, said she had traveled from the Shiite town of Nabatiyeh south of Beirut to show her support. 
 
“We feel the demands are the same, the suffering is the same,” she said. 
 
More than half of Tripoli residents live at or below the poverty line, and 26 percent suffer from extreme poverty, a U.N. study found in 2015. 

Future uncertain
 
On Tuesday, embattled Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced his cabinet would step down. 

But it was still unclear what a new government would look like and whether it would meet protesters’ demands that it include independent experts. 
 
Roads and banks have reopened after nearly two weeks of nationwide paralysis. 
 
Fahmy Karame, 49, called for a “rapid solution to the economic crisis.” 
 
“We’re waiting for a government of technocrats,” he said.  

In Beirut, hundreds protested Saturday evening after a day of rain. 
 
“Down with the rule of the central bank,” they shouted at the tops of their lungs, clapping their hands near the institution’s headquarters. 
 
Economic growth in Lebanon has stalled in recent years in the wake of repeated political crises, compounded by an eight-year civil war in neighboring Syria. 

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Newly released documents show a Trump campaign official told the FBI that during the 2016 presidential race, the campaign’s chairman, Paul Manafort, pushed the idea that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s servers. 
 
That unsubstantiated theory was advanced by President Donald Trump even after he took office, and it would later help trigger the impeachment inquiry now consuming the White House. 
 
Notes from an FBI interview were released Saturday after a lawsuit by BuzzFeed News that led to public access to hundreds of pages of documents from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. 
 
Information related to Ukraine has taken on renewed interest after calls for impeachment based on efforts by Trump and his administration to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democrat Joe Biden. Trump, when speaking with Ukraine’s new president in July, asked about the server in the same phone call in which he pushed for an investigation into Biden. 
 
Manafort speculated about Ukraine’s responsibility as the campaign sought to capitalize on DNC email disclosures and as associates discussed how they could get hold of the material themselves, deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates told investigators, according to the notes. 
 
Gates said Manafort’s assertion that Ukraine might have done it echoed the position of Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort business associate who had also speculated that the hack could have been carried out by Russian operatives in Ukraine. U.S. authorities have assessed that Kilimnik, who was also charged in Mueller’s investigation, has ties to Russian intelligence. 
 
Gates also said the campaign believed that Michael Flynn, who later became Trump’s first national security adviser, would be in the best position to obtain Hillary Clinton’s missing emails because of his Russia connections. Flynn himself was adamant that Russia could not have been responsible for the hack. 

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Frank-Walter Steinmeier, federal president of Germany, was in Boston at the end of October to conclude a yearlong diplomatic initiative Germany launched to strengthen ties with the United States.

In remarks delivered at the re-opening of Goethe-Institut Boston on October 31, Steinmeier stressed the longstanding bond between the two countries and urged the two sides to focus less on “what separates us” and more on “what unites us.”

The Goethe-Institut, named after Germany’s most famous poet (and one-time diplomat) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is a German government-supported cultural institution active worldwide. It has offices and a presence in 10 cities in the United States.

“I have come here as Federal President to raise our sights away from the day-to-day emphasis on tweets and tirades and beyond the indignation that is often both predictable and ineffective,” Steinmeier said, in what seemed to be references to U.S. President Donald Trump’s usage of Twitter to communicate his thoughts and feelings.

“I want to expand our horizons so that we can look back on our shared history and at things that will hopefully connect us in the future, things for which we need one another,” Steinmeier continued.

Germany’s troubled history

The German federal president emphasized in his speech that “the great question of our day” is “the fight to uphold democracy and freedom,” adding “there can be no democracy without America.”

Recalling his country’s own history, Steinmeier admitted that “democracy did not come easily to us Germans,” he said. “After the disasters in our history,” he said, referring to the period of Nazi Germany that became synonymous with inhumanity, the German people “relearned it [democracy] with, and thanks to, America,” he said.

Even as Steinmeier juxtaposed the black-and-white images of John F. Kennedy standing in front of Schöneberg Town Hall uttering “Ich bin ein Berliner” with colored images of Ronald Reagan urging then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” while standing at Brandenburg Gate, realpolitik, or politics based on practical objectives rather than on ideals, intruded on the call for unity and international liberal democracy.

Realpolitik intrude

The controversial Russian-German gas pipeline construction, known as Nord Stream 2, is set to advance to scheduled completion early next year, despite strong protests by the U.S., which is concerned that it would hurt Ukraine and Poland, Washington’s close allies in the region.

And a research professor of national security studies at the U.S. Army War College published an opinion piece in the Newsweek magazine with the headline: “Germany’s refusal to ban China’s Huawei from 5G is dangerous for the West.” In the article, the author warned that decisions to allow China’s telecom company, enmeshed in troubles in North America, to gain a foothold in Germany carry consequences equal to “nothing less than an abdication of German leadership in Europe.”

According to Rachel Ellehuus, deputy director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “broadly speaking, German leaders share U.S. concerns about Russia and China.” That said, “there’s always been a strain of anti-Americanism in Germany society, particularly among more pacifist, left-wing elements,” she noted in a written interview with VOA, though “at the end of the day, NATO and the transatlantic relationship have been and remain a central pillar of German foreign and security policy.”

Affinity for Americans

Daniel S. Hamilton, an expert on transatlantic relations at Johns Hopkins University, told VOA that German public opinion surveys consistently record “deep popular distrust of President Trump, yet still strong affinity for American society and American popular culture.”

As Hamilton sees it, tariffs levied on German and European products by the Trump administration and threats of additional tariffs on autos and auto parts “central to Germany’s manufacturing economy” couldn’t help but generate resentment among Germans.

In a sign that at least certain areas of U.S.-German relations are moving forward and not backward, the two countries’ military leaders recently signed an agreement aimed at achieving an unprecedented level of interoperability within the next seven years, premised on the belief that their joint ground forces are instrumental in keeping peace in Europe, as reported by Defense News.

Speaking in Boston, German Federal President Steinmeier vowed that Germany’s efforts to continue its alliance with the U.S. are set “in stone” far beyond a single Deutschlandjahr USA, that is, a year dedicated to German-American friendship described as Wunderbar Together.
 

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A controversial fraud case against Russia’s leading theater and movie director, Kirill Serebrennikov, was relaunched Friday by prosecutors in Moscow after a string of small legal wins this year upset their case.

The 50-year-old Serebrennikov and three co-defendants are accused of embezzling up to $2 million in public money from a theater project, an accusation they deny and describe as absurd.

The director, who last month received a major arts award from the French government, has been involved in anti-government protests, has warned about the growing influence of the Orthodox Church on Russian society and politics, and he protested arts censorship in Russia.

He denies any wrongdoing, and his supporters, including actors Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss, say the charges are politically motivated and fit a pattern of authorities retaliating against dissenting artists.

The relaunch of the prosecution came as another Moscow court Friday approved the Justice Ministry’s branding of opposition politician Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation as “a foreign agent.” Observers see this as a prelude to a possible closing of Navalny’s foundation, which has embarrassed Kremlin figures with investigative reports highlighting their extraordinary wealth and extensive property ownership.

Another legal victory

As the preliminary hearing unfolded, attorneys for Serebrennikov and his fellow defendants scored another small legal win Friday when the judge, Olesya Mendeleeva, declined a request by prosecutors for a travel ban on all the defendants. When the charges were first laid out in 2017, Serebrennikov and his co-accused were placed under house arrest, but a court freed them on bail last April, allowing them to work and communicate freely as long as they remained in Moscow.

His freedom allowed him to personally receive last month the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French envoy, Sylvie Bermann, at the French Embassy in the Russian capital. She described Serebrennikov as “a key figure in Russian culture” and said his prominence went well beyond Russia’s borders.

On Friday, prosecutors said the film director could evade justice without some travel restrictions being imposed, but the defense stressed that would block Serebrennikov and the others — producer Yury Itin, former Culture Ministry employee Sofia Apfelbaum and theater director Aleksei Malobrodsky — from continuing with their work. The judge said prosecutors had offered no evidence that any of the accused posed flight risks.

Case returned to prosecutors

Serebrennikov, artistic director of the Moscow Gogol Center Theater, and his co-defendants are accused of embezzling state funds allocated by the government for the development and popularization of modern art. Moscow’s Meshchansky District Court decided in mid-September to return the case to prosecutors more than two years after the defendants’ arrest because of inconsistencies in the charges.

Last month, the Moscow City Court overturned that ruling and ordered the Meshchansky court to retry the case. Some of Russia’s most famous actors and directors have rallied around the award-winning film and theater director, who faces up to 10 years in prison if found guilty. Chulpan Khamatova, an actress known in the West for the 2003 movie Good Bye, Lenin!, has said, “A political motive for these charges is the only motive I can see.”

Serebrennikov moved to Moscow from his native Rostov-on-Don in 2012, having been invited to manage the Gogol Center in the city’s rundown Basmanny district. The avant-garde and controversial performances staged soon drew international attention. Serebrennikov’s own plays poked fun at Putin and mocked the ruling elite, even so Russia’s power brokers appeared able to accept the theatrical ridicule until around 2014. In the wake of the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, state funding for the center’s Platforma festival started to disappear.

Serebrennikov also became more outspoken in his criticism of Putin’s government, and he focused many of his complaints on the Russian Orthodox Church, criticizing it among other things for its opposition to the rights of the LGBT community.

In 2016, he directed a powerful movie, The Student, a critique of the church, which portrayed a teenager becoming a fanatical Orthodox Christian. Under house arrest, he still managed to complete a new film, Leto, and directed from afar operas performed in Zurich and Hamburg, overseeing rehearsals with directions sent on USB sticks.

In his first play after being released from house arrest, he had an actor speak the line, “Democracy is just a short break between one dictatorship and the other.” According to local media reports, one of Putin’s spiritual advisers, Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov, complained to the Russian leader shortly before Serebrennikov’s arrest about The Student. The cleric has denied the reports.

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Citing a rise in ethnic and racial violence in many parts of the world, the State Department is mobilizing U.S. partners to combat white supremacist and other extremist groups.

Nathan Sales, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, said Friday the “world saw a rise in racially or ethnically motivated terrorism” in 2018, calling the development a “disturbing trend.”

“Our role is mobilizing international partners to confront the international dimensions of this threat,” Sales said at the launch of the State Department’s 2018 Country Report on Terrorism.

Sponsors of terrorism

The report called Iran “the world’s worst sponsor of terrorism,” saying the Iranian regime, through its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, spends nearly $1 billion a year to support terrorist groups such as the Lebanese Hezbollah.

“Many European countries also saw a rise in racially, ethnically, ideologically or politically motivated terrorist activity and plotting, including against religious and other minorities,” the report said.

For example, the report noted an estimated 2,000 “Islamist extremists” and 1,000 “white supremacist and leftist violent extremists” in Sweden. A 2018 assessment by the Swedish Security Services called the extremists’ presence a “new normal.”

Cross-border links

Echoing recent assessments by the FBI and other security officials, Sales said that white supremacists and other extremists increasingly communicate with like-minded cohorts across international borders.

“We know that they are, in a sense, learning from their jihadist predecessors, in terms of their ability to raise money and move money, in terms of their ability to radicalize and recruit,” Sales said.

U.S. law enforcement officials are increasingly concerned about such cross-border links between extremists. In some cases, right-wing extremists have traveled to Ukraine to fight on either side of the five-year conflict in the east of the country.

The links between U.S. extremist groups and their foreign counterparts appear to be more ideological than operational. But what worries the FBI is the inspiration white supremacists can draw from violent groups overseas, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the House Homeland Security Committee Wednesday.

“I think you’re onto a trend that we’re watching very carefully,” Wray said.

“We have seen some connection between U.S.-based neo-Nazis and overseas analogues,” he said. “Probably a more prevalent phenomenon that we see right now is racially motivated violent extremists here who are inspired by what they see overseas.”

The rise of violent groups on the right has started a debate among policymakers over whether some outfits should be designated as terrorist organizations.

No domestic terrorism penalty

The problem is that while “material support” for international terrorism is a chargeable offense, there are no penalties for domestic terrorism.

One proposed solution is to pass a law that would allow prosecutors to bring domestic terrorism charges against defendants. Another is to add overseas white supremacist groups to the State Department’s list of designated foreign terrorist organizations.

Sales deferred a question about terrorism designations to the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.

Asked whether a proposed law on “domestic terrorism” will help the FBI, Wray said, “Certainly we can always use more tools. Our folks at the FBI, just like (federal prosecutors), work with [the motto] ‘Don’t Give Up,’ and so they find workarounds.”

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