Special

On July 14, 2016, 31-year-old Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel ploughed a rented 19-tonne truck through crowds out celebrating France's Bastille Day in Nice.

He was shot dead by police at the scene but 86 people died and 458 others from 19 different countries were wounded.

There have been 12 vehicular attacks since 2006, 10 of which occurred in the two-year period following this incident. Nice has the highest death toll.

One of Bouhlel's first victims was Fatima Charrihi, a Moroccan woman wearing a headscarf. In fact a third of the victims that day were Muslim men, women and children - including four year-old Kylan al-Majri who had come out to enjoy the fireworks with his family.

Truck Attack in Nice looks at the event through the eyes of three Muslim families who lost two young sons and a wife and mother. They re-tell their own versions of their ordeals on an evening that started with celebration and ended in violent tragedy, as they all struggle to come to terms with a loss that they simply cannot comprehend.

The relatively high numbers of Muslim victims in Nice and in the similar Barcelona attacks a year later, challenge the common perception that this type of violence is somehow an expression of Islamic teaching or values.

Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had been radicalised quickly through ISIL propaganda a few weeks before Bastille Day. He was known to French police for threatening behaviour, violence and petty theft but did not figure on the "Fiche S", or France's high-security watch list. He was a loner whose neighbours said smelled of alcohol and behaved strangely.

The 2016 attack in Nice followed those in 2015 on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and Bataclan nightclub and neighbouring restaurants in Paris. Each incident turned up the heat in the debate about the relationship between Islam and violence in French politics and society.

In the months following Nice, politicians were campaigning for the French presidency.

Marine Le Pen seized the opportunity to make political capital out what she and her party call "the Islamisation of France", and former Prime Minister Francois Fillon spoke of what he called a new type of fear running through some parts of French society.

"This radical Islam is plaguing some of our fellow citizens. It challenges our common values. I won't allow this. I want strict administrative control of the Muslim religion before it takes root within the Republic," he said.

But the French Muslims families in this film see things quite differently. For them, it's not about Islam at all.

"Don't involve Islam in this issue," said Tahar al-Majri, who lost his ex-wife and four-year-old son Kylan in the Nice attack. "He ran down people aged four to 80. You can't kill people and say, 'God is Great'. God never tells us to kill people."

Rising waters, falling oxygen levels and no easy way out.

It's a treacherous situation for anyone, especially 12 children and their football coach who've been trapped in a cave in Thailand.

It's a story that has gripped the attention of much of the world. And on Sunday, several of the trapped boys were successfully rescued and taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.

Elite divers guided the boys through hours of walking, crawling, and swimming with an oxygen tank, out of a deep cave complex.

The team-mates along with their coach, had been trapped for more than two weeks.

In this special edition of The Listening Post, we track the making and breaking of the West Africa Leaks, an investigative series looking into the offshore financial dealings of the rich and powerful in the region.

With more than a dozen journalists from 11 countries, the West Africa Leaks is the largest media collaboration in West African history.

It's the latest major investigation coordinated by the DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) which teamed up with the Norbert Zongo Cell for Investigative Journalism (CENOZO) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

As Will Fitzgibbon, the Africa Projects Coordinator for ICIJ told us: ''What we've seen with global and media collaborations, not only is it the more the merrier, but the more the punchier.''

The Listening Post followed the investigation since February this year when the journalists involved first met in Dakar, Senegal to lay the groundwork for the project.

During a two-day workshop set up by the ICIJ and Cenozo, the journalists were given access to data in six major leaks held by the ICIJ, all relating to the murky world of offshore finance, and were shown how to navigate their away around roughly 30 million documents.

West Africa accounts for more than one-third of the estimated $50bn that leaves Africa each year illegally, more than the gross domestic product (GDP) of six of its poorest countries combined.

Governments in the region seem to lack the ability, or the will, to prevent the illicit flow of money offshore.

West African news outlets are typically owned by politicians, or those close to them, so coverage steers away from holding the elite to account, contributing to a climate of impunity that has allowed this kind of corruption to go unchecked for decades.

And this is why it didn't take long for the journalists in this media collaboration to start uncovering some newsworthy stories in the data.

In Niger, an ambitious government-funded project never materialised despite large amounts of money changing hands.

In Togo, a businessman with close ties to the ruling family tried to wire money out of the country while two state companies in his charge were on the verge of bankruptcy.

Contrary to the Vienna Convention, a former Ghanaian ambassador to the United States set up an offshore company while in office to apparently conceal his share of a lucrative oil deal.

And in Liberia, it looks like a close friend of the former president was able to leverage her government connections to land a controversial mining license for a foreign company.

On May 22, the West Africa Leaks went live.

The journalists had overcome a number of obstacles along the way to produce a series of stories that were published simultaneously across the region. The stories lit up social media, but the official reaction was muted.

That governments were slow to respond to the revelations in the West Africa Leaks - or ignored them completely - came as no surprise.

What was more concerning was the lack of response from other news outlets in the region. One would expect stories about high-level corruption and financial irregularities in some of the poorest countries on earth to top the news agenda.

However, the subjects of these investigations are the very people who - in large part - control what gets reported in West Africa, and what does not.

For the journalists involved, however, the impact of projects like West Africa Leaks isn't to be measured in the here and now.

As Emmanuel Dogbevi of Ghana Business News told us: "What no one can take away from the West Africa Leaks is the fact that it's historic, it's the first time you have this number of journalists within the sub-region collaborating and working together on a project, which itself adds to the value of the work we do as journalists. And we hope that in the long term, that collaboration will serve as inspiration for other African journalists."

Last week it was Europe. This week, China.

Step-by-step, US President Donald Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminium are taking effect and the world, in turn is responding.

In addition to the EU and, now, China countries as far afield as Canada and India have also slapped tariffs on American goods in retaliation for the Trump administration's levies on imported steel and aluminium.

The trump administration has responded by threatening even more levies on foreign goods entering the US.

But the fight between Washington and a growing list of countries is not just about trade.

At last month's G7 summit in Canada, Trump was at odds with most of his country's closest allies.

Many of the same tensions seem likely to cloud next week's NATO summit in Brussels.

In all these debates, President Trump talks about ''winning'' and what he calls ''better deals.''

But it often seems like his real target is the web of international institutions and alliances that have evolved in the decades since the end of the second World War - often at the behest of America itself.

So, can the global system of rules-based institutions survive Trump's efforts to undermine them?

In this episode, The Stream speaks with journalists from the around world to explore:

Remember the Rohingya?
Al Jazeera Senior Correspondent Mohammed Jamjoom joins us live from Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar to talk about the ongoing - and under-reported - Rohingya refugee crisis. Tens of thousands of people are threatened by flooding and monsoon rains, which are expected to damage refugee camps and increase the potential for waterborne diseases such as cholera. Hundreds of shelters and latrines have collapsed or been destroyed, and the UN estimates that half of the 200,000 people in the camps are children.

Approximately 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar to Bangladesh since August 2017, and although both nations agreed on a plan to repatriate refugees, less than 200 have been resettled since November. Aid groups, including the UN refugee agency, are now racing to get relief to those who could be affected by the flood waters.

Denmark's ''ghetto'' controversy
New laws in Denmark are to subject children from low-income, primarily Muslim, communities to mandatory training in ''Danish values.'' The new policy will require toddlers to receive weekly instruction in Danish religious and cultural norms. Proponents say the laws will not only help children better integrate into Danish society, but tackle high crime rates and unemployment in ''parallel communities'' of uneducated immigrants from ''non-Western countries.''

''To me this is about, no matter who lives in these areas and who they believe in, they have to profess to the values required to have a good life in Denmark,'' justice minister Soren Pape Poulsen has said.

But critics say the rhetoric used by several politicians to describe people living in the so-called ''ghettos'' recalls Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews prior to World War II.

''We call them 'ghetto children, ghetto parents,' it's so crazy. It is becoming a mainstream word, which is so dangerous'', Social Democrat MP Yildiz Akdogan told the New York Times. ''People who know a little about history, our European not-so-nice period, we know what the word 'ghetto' is associated with.''

Mosul, one year later
It's been almost one year since Iraqi government forces ended ISIL's occupation of Mosul. The battle for Iraq's second-biggest city left it in ruins and forced hundreds of  thousands of civilians from their homes. As residents move back to rebuild lives and recover bodies from the rubble, ISIL is now reportedly stepping up efforts to regain position in the historic city. We'll look at how Mosul has changed since ISIL's defeat, what's still necessary to secure it, and whether ISIL can make a comeback.

In the case of Swiss banks depositing money by citizens and companies of any country, India reached 73 in 2017. In this case Britain remains on top. In 2016, India's position was 88th in this case.

According to a recent report of Swiss National Bank, in the year 2017, the deposits of Indians in Swiss banks increased by 50 per cent and it became almost 7,000 crore rupees. In 2016, it dropped by 44 percent and India's position was 88th.

In this list, the neighboring country Pakistan has been ranked 72st. Although it is less than its previous position, the money it deposits has decreased 21 percent during the year 2017. In the report of Swiss National Bank, this money has been shown as liability towards its customers. Therefore, it is not clear how much of that time is black money.

These official figures are issued annually by the Central Bank of Switzerland. These figures do not include funds deposited in the name of units from other countries by Indians, NRIs and others. It is often alleged that people of Indian and other countries deposit their illegal earnings to Swiss banks, which are considered as safe havens to avoid taxes.

Although Switzerland has signed a deal to share automatic information with many countries including India. With this, India will start getting the information of depositors in Swiss Bank automatically from January next year. It is notable that according to the money, India's position was 75th in 2015 and 61st in 2014. Britain is the first and USA is the second place in the list.

The top ten countries include West Indies, France, Hong Kong, Bahamas, Germany, Guernsey, Luxembourg and Cayman Islands. China ranked 20th in the list of BRICS countries, Russia's 23rd, Brazil's 61st, South Africa's 67th. In neighboring countries Mauritius is ranked 77th, Bangladesh's 95th, Sri Lanka's 108th, Nepal's 112th and Afghanistan's 155th place.

Between 1996 and 2007, India was among the top 50 countries on this list. Then in 2008, it was 55th, 59th in 2009 and 2010, 55th in 2011, 71st in 2012 and 58th in 2013.

During the Modi regime, the accumulated wealth of Indians in Swiss banks has increased 50 percent. For the first time in 4 years, the accumulated money deposited in the Swiss bank increased to one billion Swiss francs (7,000 crore rupees) last year. This figure shows an increase of 50 percent compared to a year ago.

This is revealed in the latest figures of Swiss bank's central bank. According to this, the money kept by Indians in Swiss bank accounts increased by more than 50 percent to Rs 7,000 crore (1.01 billion francs) in 2017.

Earlier, there was a steady decline in deposits of Indians in the three years here in the banks. In the compounding of Indians in Switzer Land, which is an identity for their banking secrecy, it is surprising that the visible increase in time is at this time, while the Indian government has been campaigning against black money holders abroad.

According to the annual data of Swiss National Bank (SNB), Indian wealth deposited in Swiss bank accounts declined by 45 percent in 2016 to 67.6 million francs (about 4500 crore rupees). This amount was the lowest since the beginning of publication of this figure since 1987.

According to the SNB data, the funds placed directly in Swiss bank accounts by Indians became approximately 6891 crore (99.9 million francs) in 2017. At the same time, the money kept by the representatives or the wealth managers was 112 crore rupees (1.62 million francs) during this period.

According to the latest data, Rs. 3200 crores in the form of customer deposits in the money deposited in Swiss bank accounts, Rs. 1050 crores through other banks. All these items have increased the wealth of Indians in the year ahead.

Indians' wealth in Swiss bank accounts increased by 12 percent in 2011, 43 percent in 2013 and 50.2 percent in 2017. Prior to this, in 2004, the fund raised 56 percent. These figures of SNB have been released at such times, while a few months ago, a new system of automatic exchange of information between India and Switzerland has been implemented. The purpose of this arrangement is to get rid of the problem of black money.

Meanwhile, the profits of Switzerland's banks increased by 25 percent to 9.8 billion francs in 2017. However, the deposits of foreign customers of these banks declined during this period. Before this, the profits were reduced to almost half of the 7.9 billion francs in 2016.

A monitoring website claimed on Wednesday that despite the announcement of the commitment to disarmament of Korea Peninsula in the Singapore Summit, North Korea is increasingly improving its nuclear research center.

Kim Zhang, a nuclear weapons-rich North Korean leader, promised to work towards this goal in a historic dialogue with US President Donald Trump earlier this month in Singapore, but the Singapore meeting gave a clear definition of disarmament or North Korea by failing to give a clear timetable to destroy nuclear weapons reserves.

According to the '38 North' website, Trump claimed that the process would start early and they had said last week that there will be complete disarmament which has started, but according to the website, recent satellite photos showed that North Korea's main Yongbayon Not only are the operations going on at the atomic site, but infrastructure work is also being done there.

US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong met for the historic summit in Singapore. The objective of this meeting was to make bilateral relations normal and to complete nuclear disarmament in the Korean Peninsula. Between Trump and Kim, this meeting took place in a Singapore hotel's popular tourist destination Santosa. The two leaders started the summit with warm hands in front of the media crew at the hotel.

US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong met here warmly and the first round of talks was held between them. At the same time, the general summit between the two leaders began with the aim of normalization of bilateral relations and complete nuclear disarmament in the Korean Peninsula.

According to the North Korean media, Kim actually reached the meeting place seven minutes before the trump. He did this to express respect because it is a culture where young people reach them before expressing their respect for the elderly. The red tie that Trump wore, could also have some respect for Kim because North Korean likes this color.

Asked how the conversation was, Trump said, "Very, very good. Fantastic relationships.'' Kim was asked at least three times whether he would leave nuclear weapons, in response to that he just smiled. Trump and Kim both commented briefly.

Trump said that he believes that he and Kim will overcome the big problem, the big dilemma and we will take care of it by working together. Kim said, "There will be further challenges, but we will work with Trump. We will overcome all speculation and suspicions about this summit and I believe that it is good for peace."

Donald Trump has become the first US president to meet and shake hands with a North Korean leader. After months of speculation and threats, the two men met on Singapore's Sentosa island.

They held a 40 minute meeting, followed by a signing of a joint statement in which they agreed to the de-nuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.

But it was a document vague in detail and lacking a time frame.

So, what will the North Korean leader get in return for agreeing to 'de-nuclearise'?

The southern Indian state of Kerala has been put on 'all-time alert' after at least 17 of the people infected with Nipah virus died in the past weeks.

Kerala's Health Minister KK Shailaja told on Monday that the state is on an 'all-time alert' to prevent the infectious disease - which causes acute respiratory problems or fatal brain swelling among humans - from spreading further.

"All efforts are being made by authorities to confirm that more lives are not lost due to Nipah," she said.

The viral outbreak has resulted in the quarantine of 2,379 people in their homes in the southern state, health and government officials have said.

More than 2,000 people are under medical observation in Kerala's Malabar region, uncertain whether they have been infected with the disease.

Individuals who had any contact with infected persons have been included in the list.

The state's director of health services, RL Saritha, said on Monday that there had been no new cases reported since June 1.

"The preventive measures have been implemented with greater efficiency. There is no need to panic," Saritha told.

The Nipah virus is believed to be transmitted from animals to humans. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), fruit bats are the natural hosts of the disease.

India's National Centre for Disease Control and experts from the National Institute of Virology said they are also monitoring the situation.

Raised alarms

The outbreak of the disease and risk of its spread have raised alarms among the people in four most-affected districts of Malabar region of the state.

Dr Ajaz Ali, a surgeon at Koyilandy Taluk hospital in Kozhikode district, said that since the news of the disease broke out, many patients have refrained from coming to the hospital.

"There were more than 1,200 people coming here every day, and now it has reduced to below 200. All are afraid of crowds due to the Nipah risk.

Isolation wards for patients infected with Nipah have been set up at the Kozhikode Medical College Hospital.

The disease has also forced state authorities to close schools and colleges and postpone exams in Malabar.

District authorities have also asked people to keep away from crowded areas as a precautionary measure. District courts in some areas have also temporarily suspended operations.

Businesses affected

The disease outbreak has affected the livelihood of people as businesses have shut down. Sales in restaurants and shops selling produce, meat and fish have fallen in the past few weeks.

"Bus stands are empty. People are avoiding travel. They are remaining at home and using protective masks while travelling," said Rajeev, a bus conductor from Kozhikode district.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar have banned imports of fresh and frozen vegetables and fruits from Kerala. The ban will continue until the outbreak is controlled.

Bahrain and Qatar have also urged their nationals and residents to avoid travelling to Kerala until the epidemic is under control.

An estimated 1.6 million migrants from Kerala form the majority of the Indian community in the UAE, Qatar and Bahrain.

Tracing the source

Health authorities in India said they have no evidence to suggest that the Nipah virus in Kerala was transmitted by fruit bats as suspected initially.

Samples collected from the droppings, serum and blood of bats tested negative for the Nipah virus, officials the National Institute of High Security Animal Diseases said.

The last Nipah outbreaks - reported in 2001 and 2007 in India's West Bengal - claimed 70 lives. Nipah has killed more than 260 people in Bangladesh, Malaysia, and India and Singapore since 1998.

The deadly virus got its name from the Kampung Sungai Nipah village in Malaysia where it was first reported.

Despite the absence of a vaccine to prevent Nipah from spreading, an antiviral drug used against hepatitis C infection seems to contain shivering and vomiting in patients, the WHO said.

The two confirmed cases in Kerala, who have been under treatment now, have also been responding well to the anti-hepatitis drug, said the director of health services.

Meanwhile, India's national disease control agency said no similar cases of Nipah had been detected in other parts of the country.