Category: Євросоюз

It’s said that history often repeats itself — the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Many Britons feel they are living through both at the same time as their country navigates its way out of the European Union. The British government awarded a contract to ship in emergency supplies to a company with no ships. It pledged to replace citizens’ burgundy European passports with proudly British blue ones — and gave the contract to a Franco-Dutch company. It promised to forge trade deals with 73 countries by the end of March, but two years later has only a handful …

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British Prime Minister Theresa May is to hold Brexit talks with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker next week, her office said on Saturday, following this week’s symbolic defeat in parliament which was widely interpreted as undermining her negotiating strength with the EU. Her office did not give a date for the talks but said May planned to speak to the leader of every EU member state over the coming days. On Monday, Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay will meet EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier, it added in a statement. On Tuesday, Attorney General Geoffrey Cox, will make a speech setting out …

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Far-right lawmakers are set to be elected to Spain’s parliament for the first time in nearly four decades, two opinion polls showed Saturday, forecasting that no single party would get a majority in a snap election on April 28.  Spain’s Socialists, who have been in power since June with a minority government, are set to gain more seats than any other party but fall well short of a majority, the surveys showed.  Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called the early election on Friday after Catalan pro-independence parties who had previously backed him joined opposition parties in defeating his 2019 budget bill this week.  The far-right party Vox would win up …

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British regional airline Flybmi has gone into administration and canceled all flights immediately, the company said in a statement Saturday, blaming Brexit uncertainty as one of the reasons for its collapse.  A spokesperson for British Midland Regional Ltd. said the company had made the decision because of increased fuel and carbon costs and of uncertainty arising from Britain’s plans to leave the European Union on March 29.  The airline, based in the English East Midlands, operates 17 planes flying to 25 European cities. It employs 376 people in Britain, Germany, Sweden and Belgium.  “We sincerely regret that this course of action has become the only option open to us, but …

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China on Saturday rejected German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s appeal to join a Cold War-era arms control treaty that the United States accuses Russia of breaching, saying it would place unfair limits on the Chinese military.  Fearing a nuclear arms race between China, Russia and the United States after the collapse of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which the United States is withdrawing from, Merkel made her call for a global treaty.  “Disarmament is something that concerns us all and we would of course be glad if such talks were held not just between the United States, Europe and Russia but also with China,” Merkel told the Munich Security Conference.  Russia …

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More than 2,000 far-right activists from several European countries staged a torchlit procession through Sofia on Saturday to honor a Bulgarian pro-Nazi general, despite opposition from the Balkan country’s political parties and Jewish groups. The procession, known as the Lukov March after Hristo Lukov, who led the pro-Nazi Union of Bulgarian National Legions in the 1930s and early 1940s, went ahead after a court overturned the Sofia municipality’s ban for a second consecutive year.  Participants, mostly young men in dark clothing, many bearing swastikas and making the Nazi salute, laid wreaths at the former home of Lukov amid heavy police security. Some activists had come from Germany, Sweden, Hungary and elsewhere.  “General Lukov was a valiant militant officer — …

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Thousands of opposition supporters clashed with police outside the Albanian parliament on Saturday during an anti-government protest demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama. Critics have accused the socialist prime minister, in power since 2013, of corruption. Police fired tear gas and water cannons at protesters, some of whom tried to enter the parliamentary building in Tirana by forcing their way through the main entrance. Five police officers and about 10 demonstrators and journalists required hospital treatment, mostly for breathing problems after the clashes, the health ministry said.  Protesters repeatedly tried to break through police lines. Several windows were broken as …

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The Vatican said Saturday that Pope Francis has defrocked disgraced former U.S. cardinal Theodore McCarrick. In July of last year, Francis accepted McCarrick’s resignation from the College of Cardinals following allegations he had sexually abused minor and adult seminarians over a period of decades. The Vatican said in a statement that in January 2019 it had found McCarrick guilty of “. . . solicitation in the Sacrament of Confession and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and with adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power.” (The Sixth Commandment says ‘Thou shall not commit adultery’ and is …

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A Russian court has decided to prolong the detention of American investor Michael Calvey, founder of Baring Vostok Capital Partners, a Moscow-based private equity group. Late Friday the court moved to extend Calvey’s arrest for at least 72 hours and called for a second hearing Saturday. Four other defendants in the case have been ordered to remain in pretrial custody for two months. A spokeswoman for the Moscow district court Friday announced that Calvey had been detained along with other members of the firm Thursday on suspicion of stealing $37.5 million (2.5 billion rubles), a charge that carries of a …

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Disgraced former U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been expelled from the Roman Catholic priesthood following allegations against him, including sexual abuse of minors, the Vatican said Saturday. McCarrick, who in July became the first Roman Catholic prelate in nearly 100 years to lose the title of cardinal, has now become the highest profile church figure to be dismissed from the priesthood in modern times. The defrocking was announced ahead of next week’s meeting at the Vatican between the heads of national Catholic churches to discuss the global sexual abuse crisis. McCarrick had appealed the decision, but it was upheld and …

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A gay French writer has lifted the lid on what he calls one of the world’s largest gay communities — the Vatican, estimating that most of its prelates are homosexually inclined and attributing much of the current crisis in the Catholic Church to an internecine war among them. In the explosive book, In the Closet of the Vatican, author Frederic Martel describes a gay subculture at the Vatican and calls out the hypocrisy of Catholic bishops and cardinals who in public denounce homosexuality but in private lead double lives. Aside from the subject matter, the book is astonishing for the …

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Spain will elect its third government in less than four years after Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s fragile socialist government acknowledged Friday its support had evaporated and called an early general election. Sanchez’s eight-month-old administration met its end after failing to get parliament’s approval for its 2019 budget proposal earlier this week, adding to the political uncertainty that has dogged Spain in recent years. “Between doing nothing and continuing without a budget, or giving the chance for Spaniards to speak, Spain should continue looking ahead,” Sanchez said in a televised appearance from the Moncloa Palace, the seat of government, after an …

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Sitting in her living room, 65-year-old Tatyana Rybalchenko goes through a stack of black-and-white photos from more than 30 years ago. In one of them, she is dressed in a nurse’s coat and smiles sheepishly at the camera; in another, she shares a laugh with soldiers on a road with a mountain ridge behind them. The pictures don’t show the hardships that Rybalchenko and 20,000 Soviet women like her went through as civilian support staff during the Soviet Union’s 1979-1989 invasion of Afghanistan. Although they did not serve in combat roles, they still experienced the horrors of war. As Russia …

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Pressure is mounting on the British government to decide whether it will repatriate — and prosecute when possible — dozens of the Islamic State group’s surviving British-born recruits, currently held by U.S.-led Kurdish forces in northeast Syria. Britain, like other European countries, has been reluctant to take back IS recruits, whether male fighters or so-called jihadi brides as well as their children. A small number have been repatriated to their countries of origin, but hundreds are awaiting political or legal resolution of their cases as their appeals for help have largely been ignored. The discovery this week in a refugee …

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A prominent figure of the French yellow vests has gone on trial in Paris for allegedly organizing illegal demonstrations, as the movement prepares for a 14th consecutive weekend of protests. Eric Drouet was arrested for organizing demonstrations on Dec. 22 and Jan. 2 in Paris without declaring them to authorities. He acknowledged he didn’t follow the rule, saying Friday he doesn’t consider himself a protest organizer. The Paris prosecutor requested a 500-euro ($563) fine and a one-month suspended prison sentence. The court’s decision will be announced on March 29. Drouet is a known figure of the movement, repeatedly calling for …

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Russia has detained American investor Michael Calvey, the U.S. founder of the Moscow-based Baring Vostok private equity group, on suspicion of fraud. A spokeswoman for Moscow’s Basmanny district court says Calvey was detained along with other members of the firm on Thursday. The court will rule later Friday afternoon on whether to keep them in custody. According to Baring Vostok’s web site, the private equity group holds more than $3.5 billion in committed capital. Prosecutors allege that Calvey, a senior partner who set the fund up in 1994, worked in concert with his colleagues to steal $37.5 million (2.5 billion …

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The European Union will give Ireland some leeway to establish new border arrangements with Northern Ireland in case of a no-deal Brexit, sources in the bloc’s political hub Brussels said. But they said Dublin would soon have to come up with a plan to ensure the integrity of the EU’s single market or face checks on its own goods coming into the rest of the bloc. “Ireland can get transition periods or some temporary opt-outs on the border in the worst-case scenario,” a senior EU diplomat said. “But soon enough it will have to face up to the fact that …

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The European Parliament urged Saudi Arabia on Thursday to abolish its male guardianship system, under which women have to seek permission from their guardian on issues such as getting married, saying it and other rules reduce women to second-class citizens. Parliamentarians also expressed concern over “government web services” that allow male guardians to track women when they cross borders. A Saudi application called Absher notifies men when women travel. Although male guardianship has been chipped away at over the years it remains in force. Under the system, every Saudi women is assigned a male relative — often a father or …

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Tensions appear to be surfacing between Russia and Turkey just hours into a three-way summit on the Syrian conflict being hosted in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. According to Kremlin spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, Russia has told Turkey it lacked authorization to create a “safe zone” inside Syria without the express consent of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “The question of the presence of a military contingent acting on the authority of a third country on the territory of a sovereign country, and especially Syria, must be decided directly by Damascus,” she told reporters during a press conference. “That’s our base …

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U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday that the United States and Europe could still work together on Iran, despite differences over what the United States calls the world’s “leading state sponsor of terror.” Pompeo, speaking at a diplomatic conference in Warsaw, said “there was not a defender of Iran in the room,” which he called proof that Europe and the U.S. still shared concerns about Iran’s nuclear activities. Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz said Europe and the U.S. agreed that Iran was a threat to international security but were arguing over what to do about it. Earlier in the day, U.S. …

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