Luigi Di Maio, the Italian deputy prime minister and leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S), has met a senior figure from the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement – a meeting likely to increase tensions between Italy and France. Di Maio and Alessandro Di Battista, a prominent M5S member, met Christophe Chalençon, as well as candidates the protest movement has put forward for the European elections in May, on the outskirts of Paris on Tuesday. Posting a photo of the group on Facebook, Di Maio described it as a “beautiful” meeting.

“The wind of change has crossed the Alps. I repeat. The wind of change has crossed the Alps,” he wrote. Di Maio had previously expressed his admiration for the gilets jaunes, who have been holding at times violent anti-government protests each week across France for the past few months. He urged the movement not to “give up” and said the demonstrations reminded him of the spirit that gave birth to the M5S in 2009. On Tuesday he said the two groups shared “many common positions and values that focus on the battles for citizens, social rights, direct democracy and the environment”.

Chalençon said while both sides “practically agree on everything”, there was no talk yet about whether they would form an alliance for the elections to the European parliament. Italian media reported that Ingrid Levavasseur, who heads the gilets jaunes’ list of 10 candidates for the elections, would meet M5S officials again in Rome next week. The meeting follows a series of verbal attacks from Di Maio and his co-deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, on the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in recent weeks and is also seen as an additional tactic by M5S to regain some of the popularity lost to Salvini’s far-right League since the coalition government came to power last June.(theguardian)…[+]

TORONTO- About C$180 million ($137.21 million) in cryptocurrencies have been frozen in the user accounts of Canadian digital platform Quadriga after the founder, the only person with the password to gain access, died suddenly in December. Gerald Cotten died aged 30 from complications with Crohn’s disease while volunteering at an orphanage in India, according to the Facebook page of Quadriga CX, which announced his death on Jan. 14.

The platform, which allows the trading of Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum, filed for creditor protection in the Nova Scotia Supreme Court last week. Quadriga has 363,000 registered users and owes a total of C$250 million to 115,000 affected users, according to an affidavit filed by Cotten’s widow Jennifer Robertson on behalf of the company. Robertson said in the affidavit that Cotten’s main computer contained a “cold wallet” of cryptocurrencies, which is only accessible physically and not online, and his death left “in excess of C$180 million of coins in cold storage.”

Robertson said she was not involved in Cotten’s business while he was alive and did not know the password or recovery key.(Reuters)…[+]

Trinidad & Tobago is earning a big name internationally with Friday’s capture in Syria of yet another ISIS fighter, Nicholas Lee, 39, originally from Point Fortin. The New York and London Times both reported yesterday that Jamaican-born Sheikh Abdullah el-Faisal was responsible for recruiting over 250 Trinidad & Tobago nationals, including Lee, to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Next week, proceedings will start in a court in Jamaica to extradite Faisal to the United States for trial. Lee’s photo appears alongside two other men, released by Kurdish forces as that of six people captured fighters for ISIS in the last four days.

One article quotes Abdul Hamid al-Muhabash who is co-chair of Democratic Autonomous Administration, based in north-eastern Syria, calling on respective governments to repatriate their nationals from war-torn areas of Syria and Iraq.

Muhabash said, “The administration and the Syrian people demand of the states from which ISIS fighters belong – more than 50 nationalities in all – to judge them according to their constitutions.”(Trinidad Newsday)…[+]