Category: Євросоюз

Greece’s Orthodox Church will resist a push by its Russian co-religionists for talks to stop Ukraine’s Church breaking away from Moscow’s orbit, Greek church officials said on Tuesday, deepening a rift within the global Orthodox Christian community. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church wants to become fully self-governing, or autocephalous, and has sought the support of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, the spiritual leader of the world’s roughly 250 million Orthodox Christians. Seeking to prevent Ukraine’s separation, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, has written to all the self-governing Orthodox Churches calling for talks about the situation in Ukraine. …

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Russia has carried out cyber attacks on Latvia’s foreign and defense apparatus and other state institutions, a Latvian intelligence agency said on Monday. Russia’s military intelligence agency (GRU) has tried to access information by e-mail phishing attacks against government computers in “recent years”, Latvia’s Constitution Protection Bureau said. “The cyber attacks in Latvia were carried out by the GRU for espionage purposes, and the most frequent attacks were directed against state institutions, including the foreign and defense sectors,” it said in a statement. No attacks directed at influencing last weekend’s parliamentary elections were detected, it said. Several Western countries issued …

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A Serb nationalist who opposes Bosnia as a state won a share of its tripartite presidency, election results showed on Monday, as Serb, Croat and Muslim ethnic parties dominated their regions in voting likely to slow the country’s march toward EU integration. The largest parties from Bosnia’s Serb, Muslim and Croat communities, which have been in power most of the time since its 1992-95 war ended, mostly entrenched their domination of all layers of Bosnia’s complex government. Since the war, which killed 100,000 people, Bosnia has been divided between a Serb Republic and a federation of Croat and Muslim cantons, …

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A human rights campaigner who has been jailed since January in the Russian province of Chechnya has been awarded a prestigious human rights prize by the Council of Europe.   The Council’s Parliamentary Assembly on Monday awarded the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize to Oyub Titiev, who heads the Chechnya branch of Russian human rights center Memorial.   The chairman of Memorial’s board accepted the award on Titiev’s behalf.   Amnesty International called Titiev “one of Russia’s most courageous human rights defenders” for his work leading Memorial’s office in Chechnya’s capital for more than nine years. His predecessor, Natalia Estemirova, …

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The second of two Russians who Britain says was responsible for the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter has been named by investigative website Bellingcat as Alexander Mishkin, who it says is a military doctor for Russia’s GRU military intelligence. The website last month named Anatoliy Chepiga, who it said was a colonel in the GRU, as the other of the two Russians who are alleged to have made the nerve agent attack on the Skripals. Russia has denied any involvement. The West has accused the GRU of running a global hacking campaign, targeting institutions from …

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The Macedonian government adopted on Monday a draft law on changing the country’s name as agreed with Greece and passed it to parliament for adoption, with the outcome still uncertain. Macedonia’s bids for EU and NATO membership had long been blocked by Greece, but in June the two countries struck a deal on changing the name of the ex-Yugoslav republic to the Republic of North Macedonia to end the 27-year dispute. However, a referendum on the agreement failed to pass turnout thresholds, leaving it to parliament to settle the issue. The ruling coalition, which has 72 lawmakers in the 120-seat …

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Pro-Russia Serb leader Milorad Dodik declared victory Sunday in the race to fill the Serb seat in Bosnia’s three-member presidency, deepening ethnic divisions in the country that faced a brutal war some 25 years ago. Dodik said he was projected to win 56 percent of the vote in the election and his main opponent, Mladen Ivanic, 44 percent. The projection was made with 85 percent of ballots counted, he said. “The people have decided,” Dodik said. Preliminary official results are expected Monday. After polls closed, Dodik and Ivanic both said they were in the lead. The presidency also has a …

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The body of a popular Bulgarian TV journalist investigating alleged corruption involving politicians and EU funds was found over the weekend, police said. Prosecutors said the body of 30-year-old Viktoria Marinova was found Saturday in a park in the northern city of Ruse. Her mobile phone, car keys, glasses and some of her clothes were missing. Police say she was raped before she was killed. “Her death was caused by blows to the head and suffocation,” Ruse prosecutor Georgy Georgiev said, adding that investigators were able to obtain a lot of DNA evidence. Interior Minister Mladen Marinov said there have …

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Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who disappeared last week after a visit to his country’s consulate in Turkey, was once a Saudi insider. A close aide to the kingdom’s former spy chief, he had been a leading voice in the country’s prominent dailies, including the main English newspapers. Now the 59-year-old journalist and contributor to The Washington Post is feared dead, and Turkish authorities believe he was slain inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, something Saudi officials vehemently deny. The U.S.-educated Khashoggi was no stranger to controversy. A graduate of Indiana State University, Khashoggi began his career in the 1980s, …

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Too few eligible voters in Romania turned out for a two-day referendum that sought to prevent same-sex marriages by changing the country’s constitution, election officials said Sunday. The national election bureau said late Sunday, after polls closed, that voter turnout was 20.4 percent, far short of the 30 percent needed for the vote to be valid. The referendum, supported by the ruling Social Democrat Party (PSD), asked voters to approve a constitutional amendment that would have changed the definition of family by declaring that a marriage is a union between a man and a woman. Presently, it defines a union …

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Italy’s far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini threatened Sunday to shut the country’s airports after media reported that Germany planned to send charter flights of rejected asylum-seekers to Italy. “If someone in Berlin or Brussels thinks of dropping dozens of migrants via non-authorised charter flights in Italy, they should know that there is not and there will be no airport available,” Salvini said on Twitter. “We will close the airports like we closed our ports,” he added in reference to Italy’s decision this summer to ban migrant rescue boats from entering its harbours. His comments came after German news agency DPA …

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Dissatisfied Latvians rejected the right-of-center ruling coalition in Saturday’s parliamentary election, but suspicion of the left-leaning pro-Russia party makes it likely the next government will be another formation of ethnic Latvian parties to the right. The result means a confirmation of the European Union and NATO member’s role as a bulwark against Russia in the increasingly hostile relationship between the West and President Vladimir Putin. Latvians, fed up with corruption and weak democracy in the Baltic country of 2 million, punished the ruling three-party coalition, which lost almost half of its votes, mostly to two newcomers. Anti-corruption The populist KPV …

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The public identification this week of more than 300 suspected agents of Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, is being dubbed by security analysts the largest intelligence blunder in Russian post-Cold War history. And the cause for the bungling comes down, they say, to the simple “human factor” of wanting to avoid traffic fines, including for drunken driving. Prompted by the midweek disclosure by Dutch and British authorities of the identities of four Russian GRU operators accused of trying to hack the headquarters of the world’s chemical weapons watchdog, the investigative journalism consortium Bellingcat subsequently trawled through a publicly available Russian …

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A village in Turkey’s remote southeastern province of Diyarbakir takes pride in the number of its university graduates. The village’s first elementary school opened its doors more than 70 years ago, and since then it has produced scores of doctors, judges, nurses and teachers. Mahmut Bozarslan files this report narrated by Bezhan Hamdard. …

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Latvia’s ruling coalition lost its majority and two newly formed parties took more than a quarter of the votes amid widespread disillusion with the Baltic country’s politicians, the result in Saturday’s parliamentary elections showed with 80 percent of the votes counted. The country of 2 million, a quarter of whom are ethnic Russians, is a frontline state in Europe’s and NATO’s increasingly tense relationship with Vladimir Putin. The pro-Russia party Harmony remained the biggest with 20 percent, because of its support from Russian-speakers, but will find it difficult to get in government as parties that oppose it because of its …

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Bosnians go to the polls Sunday to decide if their country will pursue a path toward European Union membership and NATO integration or sink deeper into ethnic strife and further fragmentation. More than two decades after a war in which more than 100,000 died, leading Serb, Croat and Muslim Bosniak parties are campaigning on nationalist tickets, reviving wartime pledges in programs that fail to offer any clear economic or political visions. About 3.35 million registered voters will take part in the presidential and parliamentary elections, choosing members of Bosnia’s tripartite inter-ethnic presidency, consisting of a Bosniak, a Croat and a …

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Pope Francis has authorized a “thorough study” of Vatican archives into how a prominent American cardinal advanced through church ranks despite allegations that he slept with seminarians and young priests, the Vatican said Saturday. The Vatican said it was aware that such an investigation may produce evidence “that choices were taken that would not be consonant with a contemporary approach to such issues.” But it said Francis would “follow the path of truth, wherever it may lead.” The statement did not address specific allegations that Francis himself knew of sexual misconduct allegations against now ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick in 2013 and …

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Romania is holding two days of voting on a proposed change to its constitution that would define marriage as “a union between a man and a woman” instead of  “a union between spouses.” Same-sex marriage is already prohibited under Romanian law.   Critics say a change in the wording of the constitution would make it just about impossible for gays and lesbians to marry in the future.   The country’s LGBT community says the referendum will do nothing more than make people feel like second-class citizens and will fuel homophobia even further. The ruling Social Democrats are responsible for bringing …

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Montserrat Caballe, a Spanish opera singer renowned for her bel canto technique and her interpretations of the roles of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, has died. She was 85. Caballe died early Saturday at Hospital San Pau in Barcelona, hospital spokesman Abraham del Moral told The Associated Press. Caballe’s family requested the cause of death not be released, saying that she had been in the hospital since September, del Moral said. Spanish media said that Caballe entered the hospital last month because of a gall bladder problem. “A great ambassador of our country has died,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said …

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A Salvadoran woman whose unexpected recovery from a life-threatening condition was deemed a miracle, paving the way for the upcoming canonization of the late Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, said Friday she’s convinced he is a saint. Speaking days before a planned pilgrimage to the Vatican along with her husband and thousands of others, Cecilia Maribel Flores also expressed hopes of meeting Pope Francis, who earlier this year approved the miracle and decided to elevate the martyred cleric to sainthood. “We know that Romero is a saint, a man of God, who as a pastor defended his flock, defended the …

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