Category: Євросоюз

The United States and Honduras signed an agreement Wednesday as part of a U.S. effort to stem the flow of Central American migrants trying to cross from Mexico. Details of the agreement have not been released, but it comes after two so-called “safe third country” deals the U.S. recently signed with El Salvador and Guatemala. Those agreements require anyone seeking refuge in the United States to apply for asylum in the first apparently safe country they enter after fleeing their homelands. A top Homeland Security official told reporters the Honduras deal “will allow migrants to seek protection as close to …

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The number of invasions of indigenous lands in Brazil has jumped in the first nine months of President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, a Brazilian Catholic Church agency said Tuesday. The Missionary Indigenous Council said illegal miners, loggers and tappers of natural resources are involved in most of the invasions. The council reported at least 160 cases of “possessive invasions, illegal exploitation of natural resources of damage to heritage” on indigenous lands in the first nine months of 2019. There were 111 recorded cases for all of last year under conservative President Michel Temer. The far-right Bolsonaro, who has the support of …

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An Army veteran who was deported to Mexico in 2018 arrived back in Chicago Tuesday for a final chance at becoming a U.S. citizen and living in the city he has called home since boyhood. Federal immigration authorities granted Miguel Perez Jr. a two-week parole into the U.S. for an immigration hearing, according to his attorney. The 41-year-old Perez has a green card as a permanent U.S. resident, but after serving time for a 2008 non-violent drug conviction was deported last year. Then last month, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued a pardon , erasing the conviction and reviving Perez’s chances …

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U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, speaking at a New York synagogue on Tuesday night, lamented the perception that the Supreme Court is becoming politicized and that the justices’ decisions are guided primarily by their partisan affiliation. Roberts’ concerns about the impression of the court comes during a highly-charged political moment when the judiciary is getting hit from all sides. President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized federal courts and judges who have blocked his policies, while some Democratic politicians have implied that the court’s conservative majority is motivated mainly by politics instead of interpreting the law. “When you live in a …

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The United States led more than 30 countries on Tuesday in condemning what it called China’s “horrific campaign of repression” against Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang at an event on the sidelines of the annual U.N. General Assembly that was denounced by China. In highlighting abuses against ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in China, Assistant Secretary of State John Sullivan said the United Nations and its member states had “a singular responsibility to speak up when survivor after survivor recounts the horrors of state repression.” Sullivan said it was incumbent on U.N. member states to ensure the world …

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Long lines of drivers at gas stations in Cuba and hours of wait for public transport are signs of the impact of sanctions imposed by the United States this year on the Caribbean island and its main ally, oil producer Venezuela. President Miguel Diaz-Canel this month warned Cubans of difficult times ahead due to limited fuel imports. He exhorted citizens to show solidarity and do their utmost to improve energy efficiency. After sanctioning Cuba’s state-run Cubametales in July and a group of shipping firms and vessels, the U.S. Treasury on Tuesday targeted four additional maritime companies and tankers they own …

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A strong earthquake rattled eastern Pakistan Tuesday afternoon forcing residents into the streets in several cities, with witnesses claiming a building collapsed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The shallow 5.8-magnitude hit 22.3 kilometers (13.8 miles) north of the city of Jhelum along the boundary separating the agricultural heartland of Punjab province and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. “The quake was 10 kilometers deep and was felt in most of Punjab province, some parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The worst hit was Mirpur, Azad Kashmir,” Pakistan’s chief meteorologist Muhammad Riaz told AFP. Witnesses, Sajjad Jarral and Qazi Tahir, told AFP at …

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Google won a major case in the European Union on Tuesday, when the bloc’s top court ruled that the U.S. internet giant doesn’t have to extend the EU’s “right to be forgotten” rules to its search engines outside the region. The case stems from a 2014 ruling that said people have the right to control what appears when their name is searched online. They can ask Google, for example, to remove a link. The French privacy regulator then wanted that rule applied to all of Google’s domains, even outside the EU, and asked the EU’s top court for advice. The …

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Thousands of migrant workers in Qatar are not getting paid by their employers and are being forced to live in dire conditions, according to Amnesty International. Despite pledging to overhaul labor laws for migrants in 2018, Amnesty said the Qatari government has failed to implement its policies on unpaid wages, as the kafala employment system continues to give companies wide-ranging powers over migrant employees. With Qatar due to host the FIFA World Cup in 2022, the human rights group is calling on the international community to put more pressure on the Gulf state to improve the conditions for its estimated …

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China called on Washington on Tuesday to cancel a planned meeting at the United Nations to discuss accusations of repression and mass detentions in its Muslim northwestern region of Xinjiang. The foreign ministry accused the Trump administration of slandering China and interfering in its affairs.   A deputy U.S. secretary of state, John Sullivan, is scheduled to lead a panel discussion on the “human rights crisis in Xinjiang” during this week’s U.N. General Assembly meeting. The United States, human rights groups and independent analysts say about 1 million of the 12 million members of Muslim ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang …

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Britain’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to suspend parliament for five weeks was unlawful and is “void and of no effect.” The court said in explaining the unanimous decision that Johnson’s prevented parliament from carrying out its role of “holding the government to account.” It highlighted the special nature of the timing of the suspension, which was to last for five of the eight weeks that remained before the deadline for Britain to exit the European Union. “This prolonged suspension of Parliamentary democracy took place in quite exceptional circumstances: the fundamental change which was due …

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Russia’s Interior Ministry says a former Kremlin official, whom media reports have called a CIA informant, has been officially declared missing. The ministry said on Monday that it had added Oleg Smolenkov, born in 1969, to its list of missing people and that it has launched a search to locate him. Earlier this month, U.S. media reports from Reuters, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post said a CIA informant in the Russian government had been extracted and brought to the United States in 2017. Some of the reports said the unidentified Russian had provided intelligence from inside …

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Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg scolded world leaders Monday at a United Nations summit calling for climate action, saying people are suffering and dying from the effects of global warming and that all the leaders have are empty words. “We are in [the] beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money,” said Thunberg, who ignited a youth movement with her Friday school strikes for climate action. She said the science has been clear for 30 years, and still they are not doing enough. “You are failing us! But the young people are starting to understand …

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U.S. President Donald Trump has dismissed any talk about impeachment by some Democrats over reports that he tried to pressure Ukraine’s president to investigate leading Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Trump told reporters as he arrived at the United Nations that he is not taking such threats “at all seriously.”  He also again said he discussed what he called  “corruption” concerning Biden and his son with Ukrainian President President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “We had a perfect phone call with the president of Ukraine. Everybody knows it. It’s just a Democrat witch hunt. Here we go again. They failed with Russia, they …

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Two Albanian journalists were taken into custody early Monday for an alleged hoax in “publishing the fake news, and causing panic among the citizens” about seismic activity, according to police. Albanian reporters Aurel Rakipllari of Syri.net and Daniela Grica of Gazeta Shekulli were questioned in relation to false warnings that a magnitude-6 aftershock was predicted to shake the nation’s capital near midnight on Sunday, authorities said. The headline on the original story called for people to leave their homes as soon as possible, triggering a massive panic as residents took to the darkened streets of a city already beset by …

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Pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq known as Popular Mobilization Forces are becoming bolder, despite calls by Iraq’s Shiite spiritual leader and prime minister to put their weapons under government control. The PMF is an umbrella organization of Iraqi Shiite militias formed in 2014 to fight the Sunni militant Islamic State (IS), whose capture of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul triggered a collapse of the nation’s military. PMF militias boast tens of thousands of fighters. Earlier this month, Iraqi media circulated a letter purportedly from the PMF’s most dominant commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, ordering the creation of a PMF air …

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Hundreds of mourners gathered Sunday to commemorate the loss of yet another European glacier. Dressed in mourning clothes, they hiked for hours in the Glarus Alps in eastern Switzerland to reach the remnants of the Pizol glacier at 2,600 meters above sea level. The glacier has lost more than 80% of its volume since 2006. “I have climbed up here countless times,” Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich university, told the mourners. “It is like the dying of a good friend.” Will US Republicans Feel the Heat from Climate Change? Friday’s Strike for Climate Change was just one more …

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U.S. President Donald Trump admitted talking about corruption with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, but stopped short of saying they talked about investigating 2020 leading Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. A Wall Street Journal report says Trump urged Zelenskiy eight times to investigate Biden and his son Hunter, and whether a Ukrainian gas company tried to win favors by hiring Hunter while Joe Biden was U.S. vice president. The reports say Trump was looking to get Zelenskiy to collaborate with Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, to investigate the Bidens. Trump telephoned Zelenskiy in July, two months after he took power in Ukraine. …

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The planet is getting hotter, and tackling that climate peril will grab the spotlight as world leaders gather for their annual meeting at the United Nations this week facing an undeniable backdrop: rising tensions from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan and increasing nationalism, inequality and intolerance. Growing fear of military action, especially in response to recent attacks on Saudi oil installations that are key to world energy supplies, hangs over this year’s General Assembly gathering. That unease is exacerbated by global conflicts and crises from Syria and Yemen to Venezuela, from disputes between Israel and the Palestinians to the Pakistan-India …

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