Category: Євросоюз

Russians in the Far East began voting in a three-day parliamentary election in which vocal Kremlin critics have been barred from running following a historic crackdown on the opposition. Parliamentary and local polls in the world’s largest country spread over 11 time zones began at 8 a.m. Friday. So as Muscovites prepared to go to bed, residents of the Far Eastern Chukotka and Kamchatka regions were gearing up to cast their ballots. “Let’s go!” Ella Pamfilova, the head of the Central Election Commission, said in a live broadcast. “We are so excited!” The run-up to the parliamentary polls has been …

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As Germany prepares to elect a new leader, climate change is high on the agenda. Floods blamed on global warming killed hundreds in July. But as Henry Ridgwell reports from Germany, the country is also Europe’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and is struggling to wean itself off fossil fuels …

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The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned five al-Qaida supporters for allegedly helping the militant group with financial assistance. The department said the operatives supporting al-Qaida were working out of Turkey.  “We will continue working with our foreign partners, including Turkey, to expose and disrupt al-Qaida’s financial support networks,” Treasury Department official Andrea Gacki said in a statement.  Five individuals named The department said Egyptian lawyer Majdi Salim, whom it described as the main facilitator, was sanctioned, along with Muhammad Nasr al-Din al-Ghazlani, an Egyptian financial courier, and Turkish citizens Nurettin Muslihan, Cebrail Guzel and Soner Gurleyen. “As a result of today’s …

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The European Union’s executive arm asked its member countries Thursday to better protect journalists amid a rise of physical attacks and online threats against media professionals. According to the European Commission, 908 journalists and media workers were attacked across the 27-nation bloc in 2020. A total of 23 journalists have been killed in the EU since 1992, with the majority of the killings taking place during the past six years. “No journalist should die or be harmed because of their job. We need to support and protect journalists; they are essential for democracy,” said Vera Jourova, the commission vice president …

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Security forces in Istanbul detain unregistered Afghans as Turkey’s government faces growing public pressure to not accept any more refugees …

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On September 26 Germans will go to the polls in a federal election to apportion seats in the Bundestag and decide who will succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor. Marking the end of the Merkel era, many view this electoral contest as Germany’s most important election in decades. But one wouldn’t be able to guess that from the campaign, which has been bland and cautious. All the main party leaders have played for safety, promising political continuity and competing over who has the right to be seen as the true ideological heir of Angela Merkel, who’s retiring from politics. “Is this …

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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson continued reshuffling his Cabinet Thursday with two junior ministers taking on new roles.      The prime minister moved Penny Mordaunt from paymaster general at the Cabinet Office to a ministerial role at the trade department.  Mordaunt is being replaced by Michael Ellis, who served as solicitor general.      The reassignments of Mordaunt and Ellis took place a day after Johnson demoted Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab to justice secretary while naming him deputy prime minister as part of a Cabinet reshuffle seen by some as an attempt to refocus on rebuilding an economy still …

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The United States is backing Lithuania in the face of what American officials describe as China’s “coercive behavior” after Vilnius recently became the first European country since 2003 to allow Taiwan to open a representative office.On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis met for talks at the State Department. The meeting followed a call on August 21 in which Blinken “underscored ironclad U.S. solidarity” with Lithuania in the face of China’s “coercive behavior.”“Lithuania and the United States are very strong partners in NATO. We stand together for collective defense and security. We stand against …

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Three British Afghan women are on a hunger strike near the British Parliament to protest the treatment of women in Afghanistan by the Taliban. Yalda Baktash reports. …

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Campaigning to elect a new German leader this month is being clouded by concerns that the country will face a new influx of refugees — this time those fleeing Taliban rule in Afghanistan.  In 2015, more than 1 million migrants, many of them Syrians escaping their country’s civil war, traveled across the Mediterranean and Europe to reach Germany, according to German officials. Angela Merkel is not standing in the September 26 election, so Germany will soon have a new chancellor tasked with formulating policy toward Afghanistan and the unfolding refugee crisis. FILE – Armin Laschet, chairman of the German Christian Democratic Union, …

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Six years ago, more than a million migrants traveled across the Mediterranean and Europe to reach Germany — many of them Syrians escaping the civil war. So, could history repeat itself as refugees try to flee Taliban rule in Afghanistan? As Henry Ridgwell reports from Berlin, immigration is high on the agenda as Germany prepares for a general election later this month.Camera: Henry Ridgwell, Memet Aksakal   Produced by: Henry Ridgwell, Mary Cieslak    …

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Russia is preparing for parliamentary and local elections Sunday in what the opposition says is an atmosphere of repression in which a number of candidates not aligned with the ruling party have been excluded.  Jon Spier narrates this report from Ricardo Marquina in Moscow.Camera: Ricardo MarquinaVideo editor: Henry Hernandez …

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Pope Francis said Wednesday that Catholic bishops should minister to politicians who support abortion rights, such as U.S. President Joe Biden, with “compassion and tenderness,” not condemnation.The pontiff, returning to Rome from Slovakia, warned that Catholic Church leaders should not let politics enter into questions about whether observant Catholics like Biden should be refused the right to receive Communion when they attend Mass.But Francis declined to give a direct “yes” or “no” answer to whether Biden should be denied Communion, as some U.S. Catholic bishops have demanded. Francis said he did not know the U.S. case well enough to give …

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Dozens of Polish news outlets have expressed anger over a media ban at the border with Belarus, part of a state of emergency imposed by Warsaw following an influx of migrants.    Thousands of migrants — mainly from the Middle East —  have crossed or tried to cross the border from Belarus into the eastern EU member states of Latvia, Lithuania and Poland in recent months.    The EU suspects the influx is being deliberately engineered by Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko in retaliation against increasingly stringent EU sanctions on his regime.    Poland has responded to the influx by sending thousands …

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The European Union is pledging to donate 200 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to low-income countries by mid-2022. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made the pledge Wednesday in Strasbourg, France during her annual State of the European Union speech before the European Parliament. Von der Leyen said the 200 million doses the EU plans to contribute is in addition to an earlier promise of 250 million doses, which she described as “an investment in solidarity, and it is an investment in global health.” Von der Leyen said “the scale of injustice and the level of urgency is obvious” with less …

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U.S. warnings to Russian President Vladimir Putin over shielding cybercriminals holed up in Russia appear to have made little impact, according to top U.S. law enforcement and cyber officials. “There is no indication that the Russian government has taken action to crack down on ransomware actors that are operating in the permissive environment that they’ve created there,” Paul Abbate, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said Tuesday at an intelligence summit just outside Washington.  “We’ve asked for help and cooperation with those who we know are in Russia, who we have indictments against, and we’ve seen no action,” Abbate …

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In a message of inclusion, Pope Francis is reaching out to the Roma people of Slovakia, where he has condemned Central Europe’s historic marginalization of communities including Jews.On his second day in Slovakia, the pope travelled to the town of Presov in the eastern part of the country where he celebrated mass in the Byzantine rite in the city’s sports stadium. The highlight of the day was a visit to the Roma community in the nearby town of Kosice — a gesture analysts see as a sign of inclusion.The impoverished Lunik neighborhood, which the pope will visit, is home to …

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A Russian court has fined Facebook, Twitter and Telegram, saying the companies failed to delete content that Russian internet regulator Roskomnadzor said violates Russian law.    Facebook was fined about $288,000, while Twitter was fined about $69,000 and Telegram was hit with $124,00 in fines, according to the magistrate court in Moscow’s Taganskiy district.    None of the companies has commented on the issue.    The most recent fines come as Russia has levied similar fines on Google, WhatsApp and TikTok in recent months.     In March, the Kremlin slowed down Twitter in the country for failing to remove …

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When Germany’s long-standing chancellor, Angela Merkel, steps down following federal elections later this month, it will mark the end of an era, not only for Germany but also for the European Union.In power since 2005, the 67-year-old Merkel has been the third longest-serving chancellor in German history, beaten in the longevity stakes only by Otto von Bismarck in the nineteenth century and in the twentieth by Helmut Kohl. And she has been the country’s only woman chancellor.For 16 years German politics has revolved around Merkel — and so too to a large extent has the politics of the European Union.She …

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The center-left bloc headed to a victory in Norway’s elections Monday as official projections pointed to the governing Conservatives losing power after a campaign dominated by climate change and the future of the country’s oil and gas exploration industry. With a projection based on a preliminary count of nearly 93% of the votes, the Labor Party and its two allies — the Socialist Left and the euroskeptic Center Party — would hold 100 seats in the 169-seat Stortinget assembly while the current government would get 68. One seat was still unsure. As Norway’s largest party, Labor will try to form a coalition …

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