Category: Євросоюз

A German humanitarian ship with more than 800 rescued migrants, including 15 very young children, steamed into a Sicilian port on Sunday after being granted permission by Italian authorities following days of waiting in the Mediterranean Sea. The charity group Sea-Eye said the vessel Sea-Eye 4 was assigned to the port of Trapani, in western Sicily, on Saturday evening. Most of the adults were to be transferred to other ships for preventative quarantine against COVID-19, while some 160 minors, including babies and other children younger than 4, were to be taken to shelters on land. Many of the passengers came …

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Poland’s Health Ministry issued instructions Sunday to doctors confirming that it is legal to terminate a pregnancy when the woman’s health or life is in danger, a directive that comes amid apparent confusion over a new restriction to the country’s abortion law.  The document addressed to obstetricians comes in reaction to the hospital death of a 30-year-old mother whose pregnancy was in its 22nd week. The woman died in September but her death became widely known this month. Doctors at the hospital in Pszczyna, in southern Poland, held off terminating her pregnancy despite the fact that her fetus lacked enough …

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John Kerry is everywhere and on the move at a fateful U.N. climate summit. President Joe Biden’s envoy at the talks in Glasgow, Kerry steams from side talks with U.S. rivals China and Russia that painstakingly probe for common ground on climate to news conferences extolling progress. Kerry pops into project launches, rewarding CEOs and bankers for emissions-cutting efforts with high-level face time and praise. The lanky envoy smiles for a photo with Indigenous women from Brazil, their feather headdresses barely reaching his chin. Toward the end of the U.N. climate summit’s first of two weeks, Kerry’s voice grew hoarse …

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As this year’s U.N. climate talks go into their second week, negotiations on key topics are inching forward. Boosted by a few high-profile announcements at the start of the meeting, delegates are upbeat about the prospects for tangible progress in the fight against global warming.  Laurent Fabius, the former French foreign minister who helped forge the Paris climate accord, said the general atmosphere had improved since the talks began October 31 and “most negotiators want an agreement.” But negotiators were still struggling late Saturday to put together a series of draft decisions for government ministers to finalize during the second …

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Three people were wounded in a knife attack on a high-speed train in southern Germany on Saturday, local police said, adding a suspect had been arrested. Officers said the danger was over and a 27-year-old man was in custody, with unconfirmed media reports saying the suspect was of Syrian origin and suffered from psychiatric issues. The motive for the attack on the passenger train, making its way from Bavaria to the northern city of Hamburg with roughly 300 people on board, was not yet clear. Local prosecutors are handling the case rather than the federal officials who would deal with …

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Tens of thousands of climate activists marched Saturday through the Scottish city hosting the U.N. climate summit, physically close to the global negotiators inside but separated by a vast gulf in expectations, with frustrated marchers increasingly dismissive of the talks and demanding immediate action instead to slow global warming.  The mood at the protest in Glasgow was upbeat despite the anger and bursts of rain. Similar protests were also held in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Dublin, Copenhagen, Zurich and Istanbul.  Many of the marchers condemned government leaders for failing to produce the fast action they say is needed, with some echoing …

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The coup in Sudan puts into doubt the process that would have seen France cancel some $5 billion debt it was owed by the African country, France’s foreign ministry said on Friday, the latest power to pressure military leaders who seized power. France, Sudan’s second-largest creditor, has been a main actor in backing the interim authorities after former President Omar al-Bashir was ousted in 2019, but the civilian transition was derailed in October when the military took control. Speaking to reporters in a daily briefing on Friday, Foreign ministry spokeswoman Anne-Claire Legendre said Paris had been an “unwavering” partner for …

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The death of a pregnant Polish woman has reignited debate over abortion in one of Europe’s most devoutly Catholic countries, with activists saying she could still be alive if it were not for a near total ban on terminating pregnancies. Tens of thousands of Poles took to the streets to protest in January this year when a Constitutional Tribunal ruling from October 2020 that terminating pregnancies with fetal defects was unconstitutional came into effect, eliminating the most frequently used case for legal abortion. Activists say Izabela, a 30-year-old woman in the 22nd week of pregnancy who died of septic shock, …

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The United States is keeping a close watch on Russian troop movements near the country’s border with Ukraine, describing the activity as “unusual.” “We continue to monitor this closely,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters Friday, while calling on Moscow to publicly explain its intentions. “Without getting into greater detail right now, I think it’s really a matter of scale. It’s a matter of the size of the units that we’re seeing,” he said, adding, “Any escalatory or aggressive actions by Russia would be of great concern.” Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said earlier this week that an estimated 90,000 Russian …

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Cybersecurity experts say Microsoft’s recent disclosure that alleged Russian hackers successfully attacked several IT service providers this year is a sign that many U.S. IT companies have underinvested in security measures needed to protect themselves and their customers from intrusions. But a U.S.-based association of IT professionals says the industry’s efforts to combat foreign hacking attacks are hampered by their customers not practicing good cyber habits and by the federal government not doing enough to punish and deter the hackers. In an October 24 blog post, Microsoft said a Russian nation-state hacking group that it calls Nobelium spent three months attacking …

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In a tit-for-tat round of recriminations, Belarus summoned Poland’s top diplomat in Minsk on Thursday to protest claims made earlier this week by Warsaw that Belarusian border guards had threatened to open fire on a Polish patrol. The Belarusian Foreign Ministry said Polish allegations were unfounded and it accused Poland of engaging in “megaphone diplomacy” and issuing “dogmatic statements for the media.” Amid rising tensions between the two countries over Belarus being used, with Minsk’s encouragement, as a transit point by migrants, mainly from Iraq, Poland’s Foreign Ministry on Tuesday summoned Belarus’ top diplomat based in Warsaw to complain about Belarusian guards …

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Editor’s note: Here is a fast take on what the international community has been up to this past week, as seen from the United Nations perch. Leaders talk global warming in Glasgow  — World leaders met in Glasgow, Scotland, this week to try to halt global warming. But with some of the world’s biggest emitters like China and Russia skipping the conference, known as COP26, hopes dimmed that leaders will find a way to keep the world from warming more than the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius this century. Hope Eroding as COP26 Climate Pledges Fall Short — Burning coal …

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Activists will take over the UN climate summit in Scotland on Friday, capping off a week of dizzying government speeches and pledges with a student march, youth-led presentations, and a giant iceberg shipped from Greenland to Glasgow’s River Clyde to dramatize the plight of the Arctic. UK organizers decided to hand the day over to civic groups in an acknowledgement of how young campaigners like Vanessa Nakate of Uganda and Greta Thunberg of Sweden have raised public understanding of climate change, and a nod to their stance that today’s youth must live with consequences of state decisions. “We’re expecting lots …

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The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has reported its Food Price Index, which tracks the international prices of a basket of food, found that in October, the cost of a basket of food was up 3% from September. The FAO Cereal Price Index increased 3.2% in October from the previous month, while the price of wheat rose by 5% amid reduced harvests from major exporters of wheat that include Canada, Russia and the United States. The FAO also recorded the international prices of other major cereals have increased. Meanwhile, the U.N. agency said the price of vegetable oil hit an “all-time high” increase of 9.6% in October, marking a fourth consecutive month of price hikes. The FAO said the rising vegetable oil price was “largely underpinned by persisting concerns over subdued output in …

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The “end of coal” is in sight, according to Britain, host of the COP26 climate summit, after dozens of countries pledged to stop using coal and end the financing of fossil fuels. Burning coal is the single biggest contributor to climate change, accounting for about 40% of global carbon dioxide emissions, Britain said. At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, Thursday, more than 40 countries pledged to phase out coal entirely.  The signatories included big coal consumers such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Poland and Ukraine. They, alongside several global banks and financial institutions, also committed to ending all …

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The “end of coal” is in sight, according to Britain — the host of the COP26 climate summit — after dozens of countries pledged to stop using coal and end the financing of fossil fuels. But as Henry Ridgwell reports from the Glasgow summit, weaning economies off coal won’t be easy — even for Britain itself. Camera: Henry Ridgwell …

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In the fight to curb climate change, several major coal-using nations announced steps Thursday to wean themselves — at times slowly — off of the heavily polluting fossil fuel. The pledges to phase out coal come on top of other promises made at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, that the head of an international energy organization said trimmed several tenths of a degree from projections of future warming. But outside experts called that optimistic. Optimism also abounded in relation to the promises on coal, which has the dirtiest carbon footprint of the major fuels and is a significant …

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An Earth-flight giant contributes to NASA’s upcoming moon missions. Plus, words from the next crew to visit the International Space Station and grim news from NASA about the future of food on Earth. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us the Week in Space. …

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Russia has ordered the expulsion of a Dutch journalist — the second deportation of a resident foreign correspondent in the past two months — and has reduced natural gas supplies to energy-starved Europe.  News of the abrupt moves came as American intelligence chief William Burns was concluding a rare two-day visit to Moscow, part of a recent Biden administration effort to try to ease tensions over a range of geopolitical disagreements and to foster a more stable and predictable relationship between Western powers and Russia. Western nations have imposed a series of sanctions on Russia for its 2014 annexation of …

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A Russian analyst who provided information for a dossier of research used during the Trump-Russia investigation has been arrested by U.S. authorities as part of an ongoing special counsel investigation, the Justice Department said Thursday. Igor Danchenko is the third person, and second in a two-month span, to face charges in special counsel John Durham’s probe into the origins of the Russia investigation. Danchenko functioned as a source for Christopher Steele, a former British spy who was paid by Democrats to examine ties between Russia and Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. The research he compiled was provided to …

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