Category: Євросоюз

New harmful illicit drugs are inundating a flourishing market for traffickers amid violence and corruption hurting local communities across Europe, the EU’s agency monitoring drugs and addiction said Friday. The grim finding was part of the agency’s annual report. It also said that drug users in Europe are now exposed to a wider range of substances of high purity as drug trafficking and use across the region have quickly returned to pre-COVID 19 pandemic levels. Cannabis remains the most-used illicit substance in Europe, the agency found, with some 22.6 million Europeans over the age of 15 having used it in …

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Russia confirmed Friday that it had started exporting oil to Pakistan and had agreed to accept Chinese currency as payment, clarifying that the South Asian country did not receive any exclusive discounts on the purchase deal.    Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced Sunday that the first “Russian discounted crude oil cargo” had arrived and offloaded at the port in the southern city of Karachi. Sharif touted the shipment as “the beginning of a new relationship” between Islamabad and Moscow. His petroleum minister later revealed Pakistan had paid in yuan for the first government-to-government Russian crude oil import.  Russian Energy …

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Italy’s government said on Friday it had taken steps to limit the influence of Chinese investor Sinochem on tiremaker Pirelli, including a mandatory qualified majority for strategic decisions made by the company’s board.  Rome’s decision comes after Sinochem, Pirelli’s largest shareholder with a 37% stake, notified the Italian government in March of plans to update an existing shareholder pact with Camfin, the holding company of Pirelli CEO Marco Tronchetti Provera.  Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s administration scrutinized the pact under “Golden Power” rules aimed at protecting assets deemed strategic for the country, at a time when relations between China and Western …

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Flooding caused by Kakhovka dam explosion in Ukraine earlier this month could be felt as far away as the Mykolaiv region some 50 kilometers away. The Inhulets River spilled over and flooded a number of villages, Vasylivka among them. Today, locals are starting to come back to their homes.  Yelyzaveta Krotyk has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. …

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NATO launched a new center Friday for protecting undersea pipelines and cables following the still-unsolved apparent attack on the Nord Stream pipelines and amid concern Russia is mapping vital Western infrastructure for energy and the internet in waters around Europe. “The threat is developing,” Lt. Gen. Hans-Werner Wiermann, who heads a special cell focused on the challenge, said after NATO defense ministers gave the greenlight for the new center, located in Northwood, northwest London. “Russian ships have actively mapped our critical undersea infrastructure. There are heightened concerns that Russia may target undersea cables and other critical infrastructure in an effort …

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Nine people have been arrested in Greece in connection with the sinking of a boat off that country’s southern coast Wednesday that killed 78 people.  The suspects are being held on allegations of people smuggling and participating in a criminal enterprise. While 104 people were rescued, the trawler, which capsized and sank, was believed to have carried as many as 750 people, according to the International Organization for Migration, the U.N. migration agency. The Associated Press reports that 27 of those rescued remain hospitalized. Some of the survivors have been so traumatized by the accident that they still believe that …

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Pope Francis has left a hospital in Rome, where he underwent an operation for a hernia more than a week ago.  Francis left the Gemelli Hospital in a wheelchair.  When asked by well-wishers how he felt, the pope said, “Still alive.”  When he arrived at the Vatican Friday, he got out of his car to individually thank members of his Italian police escort.  The 86-year-old pontiff has suffered a number of maladies since his election, including hip problems, knee pain, weight gain, an inflamed colon and respiratory infection. While Francis has said he would consider stepping down if his health …

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Defense leaders from about 50 nations held another meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on Thursday at NATO headquarters to discuss Kyiv’s current needs following the start of its latest counteroffensive. VOA Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb has more from Brussels. …

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The Biden administration says it remains “hopeful” about Sweden’s application to join the NATO security alliance, despite tepid words from NATO’s main holdout, Turkey. But the White House declined to say whether that could happen before a NATO summit scheduled for next month. With less than a month before alliance members meet July 11 in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday that the White House was optimistic. “We are still hopeful that this will get done,” she said, “I don’t have a timeline, certainly. The sooner, the better, as I said, without delay. And so, we’ll continue …

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Can you pay my bills? That seems to be what Sweden is asking Beyoncé after the star came to town. When the singer launched her global tour last month in Stockholm, tens of thousands of fans from around the world swarmed the Swedish capital. But it’s not all fun and games for the host of the kickoff of Beyoncé’s first solo tour in seven years. A senior economist at a top Scandinavian bank says Beyoncé had something to do with Sweden’s higher-than-expected inflation rate last month. Consumer prices rose 9.7% last month in Sweden compared with a year earlier, the …

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Spain must do more to prepare for increasingly virulent wildfires stoked by climate change, a large group of the country’s leading wildfire prevention experts said Thursday.  A declaration backed by 60 experts and institutions said the “increasingly intense fires … are producing unprecedented ecological and social consequences.”  The experts concluded that Spanish society must come to terms with the emergencies that it will likely face, given that wildfires in increasingly hot and dry conditions in the Iberian Peninsula are often “beyond the capability [of firefighters] to extinguish” with their own means.  The declaration was the outcome of a two-day meeting …

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Key African countries stressed the need for grain imports to tackle food insecurity as Russian President Vladimir Putin prepares to discuss with the continent’s leaders the fate of a deal allowing the safe Black Sea export of food and fertilizer from Ukraine.  Putin said on Tuesday that Russia was considering quitting the Black Sea Grain Initiative – brokered by the United Nations and Turkey last July – because its own grain and fertilizer shipments still face obstacles. The pact could expire on July 17.  A delegation of African leaders is due to visit both Ukraine and Russia soon in a …

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Despite a surging far right and anti-immigrant rhetoric in a number of rich nations, immigrants flocking to them are faring better in areas like education, jobs and integration than they were a decade ago, according to a new report by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). “Perception does not necessarily match with reality,” Thomas Liebig, senior administrator with the OECD’s International Immigration Policy Division, said in an interview. “The reality is things have improved. The perception is that things have not improved or gotten worse.” Another reality is that the number of immigrants continues to rise, regardless …

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Finland’s accession to NATO and Sweden’s bid for membership have turned the Baltic region into a stronghold of alliance forces, a new political-military scenario very different from the one that existed prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Marcus Harton narrates this report from Ricardo Marquina in the Estonian capital, Tallinn. …

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A committee of lawmakers harshly rebuked former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday, saying he lied to Parliament about lockdown-flouting parties and was complicit in a campaign to intimidate those investigating his conduct. The House of Commons Privileges Committee found Johnson’s actions were such a flagrant violation of the rules that they warranted a 90-day suspension from Parliament. That sanction would have been more than enough to trigger a by-election that could have cost Johnson his seat in Parliament, but the former prime minister avoided that ignominy by resigning on Friday after the committee gave him advance notice of …

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Pope Francis will be discharged from hospital on Friday morning, nine days after he underwent surgery to repair an abdominal hernia, the Vatican said in a statement. Earlier on Thursday the Vatican released the first pictures of the 86-year-old pontiff since his admission to Rome’s Gemelli hospital on June 7, showing him in a wheelchair visiting its cancer ward for children. The pope’s engagements have been canceled until June 18. Francis rested well during the night, his recovery is proceeding normally, and his blood tests are in line with expected parameters, the Vatican statement said. The pope traditionally takes all …

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Ukraine’s security needs, both immediate and long-term, are expected to dominate the discussion when NATO defense ministers meet Thursday and Friday in Brussels, where Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov will brief the participants on the progress of the war. The most urgent of those needs, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar told VOA in an interview Wednesday, is ammunition for her country to defend its skies against Russian aerial attacks and to sustain its long-awaited bid to recapture some Russian-held Ukrainian territory that began last week. Kyiv’s longer-term appeal is for early admission to the 30-nation defensive alliance, a request …

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Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said his country has begun taking delivery of Russian tactical nuclear weapons, some of which he said were three times more powerful than the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The deployment is Moscow’s first move of such warheads — shorter-range less powerful nuclear weapons that could potentially be used on the battlefield — outside Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. “We have missiles and bombs that we have received from Russia,” Lukashenko said in an interview with the Rossiya-1 Russian state TV channel, which was posted on the …

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Three Kosovo police officers were detained by Serbian forces on Wednesday but officials from Kosovo and Serbia gave different locations for the arrest, accusing each other of crossing the border illegally. Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti demanded the release of the three officers. He said they had been arrested 300 meters inside Kosovan territory, near the border with Serbia. “The entry of Serbian forces into the territory of Kosovo is aggression and aimed at escalation and destabilization,” Kurti wrote on his Facebook page. In response to the detentions, Kosovo’s interior minister, Xhelal Svecla, told reporters he had ordered officers at …

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The UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, says that driven largely by the war in Ukraine, forced displacement hit a record high last year, with more than 110 million people forced from their homes across the world. For VOA, Lesia Bakalets reports from Warsaw. Videographer: Daniil Batushchak …

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