Category: Євросоюз

British Prime Minister Theresa May faced demands from ministers and lawmakers in her Conservative party to reform Northern Ireland’s highly restrictive abortion rules after neighboring Ireland’s vote to liberalize its laws. Voters in Ireland, a once deeply Catholic nation, backed the change by two-to-one, a far higher margin than any opinion poll in the run up to the vote had predicted. Penny Mordaunt, Britain’s women and equalities minister, said that the victory to legalize abortion should now bring change north of the Irish border. “A historic and great day for Ireland and a hopeful one for Northern Ireland,” Mordaunt said. …

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Spain’s maritime rescue service says it has rescued 366 migrants attempting the dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea this weekend.   The service says that its rescue craft has intercepted 73 migrants traveling in four small boats on Sunday, adding to the 293 migrants it pulled from nine vessels on Saturday.   Driven out by violent conflict and extreme poverty, tens of thousands of migrants attempt to reach Spain and other southern European countries each year by crossing the Mediterranean in smugglers’ boats. Most of the boats are unfit for open water, and thousands drown.   The U.N. says 636 …

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Streams flowing in the south of England may hold clues to the search for life on Mars. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more. …

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Russian state gas giant Gazprom said Saturday it had signed a protocol with the Turkish government on a planned gas pipeline and agreed with Turkish firm Botas to end an arbitration dispute over the terms of gas supplies.  The protocol concerned the land-based part of the transit leg of the TurkStream gas pipeline, which Gazprom said meant that work to implement it could now begin. Turkey had delayed issuing a permit for the Russian company to start building the land-based parts of the pipeline, which, if completed, would allow Moscow to reduce its reliance on Ukraine as a transit route …

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Italy’s would-be coalition parties turned up the pressure on President Sergio Mattarella on Saturday to endorse their euroskeptic pick as economy minister, saying the only other option might be a new election. Mattarella has held up formation of a government, which would end more than 80 days of political deadlock, over concern about the desire of the far-right League and anti-establishment 5-Star Movement to make economist Paolo Savona, 81, economy minister. Savona has been a vocal critic of the euro and the European Union, but he has distinguished credentials, including in a former role as an industry minister. Formally, Prime Minister-designate Giuseppe Conte presents his cabinet to the president, who …

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Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met in Moscow on Saturday for talks on such matters as resolving a dispute over four Pacific islands and eventually signing a peace treaty. Abe has been pushing for a way forward in the dispute that centers on the four most southern of the Kuril Islands, which Japan calls the Northern Territories. The Soviet Union took the islands in the closing days of World War II. The dispute has kept the two countries from signing a peace treaty formally ending World War II hostilities. Japan is seeking to implement joint …

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Thousands of protesters marched under tight security in eastern Paris on Saturday after French labor unions, left-wing political parties and civil rights groups called for “floods of people” to oppose the economic policies of President Emmanuel Macron. Marches and rallies also were held in dozens of other French cities as part of the joint action against Macron’s economic policies that organizers consider “brutal” and unbalanced At the Paris event, Philippe Martinez, head of leading French union CGT, advised the president to “look out the window of his palace to see real life.” Police estimated that 21,000 people took part in …

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A detained British-Iranian aid worker sentenced to five years in jail in Iran is to face a second trial on new security charges, the semi-official Tasnim news agency on Saturday quoted Tehran Revolutionary Court’s head Musa Ghazanfarabadi as saying. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in April 2016 at a Tehran airport as she was heading back to Britain with her two-year-old daughter after a family visit. She was convicted of plotting to overthrow Iran’s clerical establishment, a charge denied by her family and the Foundation, a charity organization that is independent of Thomson …

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Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced Friday that his country will formally become NATO’s first Latin American “global partner,” beginning next week. In a televised address from the presidential Narino Palace and on Twitter, Santos said: “We will formalize in Brussels next week — and this is very important — the entry of Colombia into NATO in the category of global partner. We will be the only country in Latin America with this privilege.” Santos, the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who made peace with FARC rebels, said the move would improve Colombia’s image on the world stage. Colombia and …

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Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former Russian oil tycoon-turned-Kremlin foe who spent a decade in prison and now lives in exile, says fellow Kremlin critics should not boycott the upcoming 2018 FIFA World Cup, slated to kick off June 14 in Russia. Russian aggression abroad, along with domestic human rights violations, has “obviously caused a serious split, both inside Russian society and in the West,” Khodorkovsky said. “There are thoughts about boycotting it, and thoughts about just turning a blind eye to everything happening in Russia during the event. But I think that boycotting the championship would be a big mistake if …

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The people of Ireland appear set to liberalize some of the world’s most restrictive abortion laws by a landslide, an exit poll showed Friday, as voters demanded change in what two decades ago was one of Europe’s most socially conservative countries. The Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI exit poll suggested that voters in the once deeply Catholic nation had backed a ballot proposal by a margin of 68 percent to 32 percent. A second exit poll was due to be published by 2230 GMT (11:30 p.m. in Dublin). Turnout could be one of the highest for a referendum, national broadcaster RTE reported, potentially topping the 61 percent who backed gay marriage …

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Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed an international investigation into the downing of Malaysian Airliner MH17 over east Ukraine in 2014 as deeply flawed, after investigators concluded Russia’s military provided the missile used in the attack that killed all 298 people aboard. Asked about the Joint Investigative Team (JIT) report during a press briefing with visiting French President Emmanuel Macron in St. Petersburg, Putin said that, while he had been too busy to read the report, “I can say right away, even not knowing what’s in it.” “From the very beginning, we offered to work together on the investigation into …

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Italy’s prime minister-designate, Giuseppe Conte, a political novice and obscure law professor accused of padding his resume, put the finishing touches to his cabinet lineup Friday. And initial reaction from financial markets was far from approving. Italian government bond prices slumped and the country’s ailing banks saw their stock prices hit an 11-month low. Italy’s outgoing economy minister, Pier Carlo Padoan, warned the incoming coalition government of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) and far-right League not to underestimate the power of the markets. “The most worrying aspect of the program, which this government is working on, is its underestimation …

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Voters in Ireland are going to the polls Friday to decide whether to keep or repeal a constitutional amendment banning abortions in most cases. The existing amendment has been in place since 1983 and originally banned all abortions before a change was made five years ago to allow abortions in cases where the mother’s life is in danger. If voters decide in Friday’s referendum to further loosen the rules, Prime Minister Leo Varadkar’s government intends to put forth legislation by the end of the year allowing abortions with no restrictions up to 12 weeks into a pregnancy. Recent opinion polls …

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Nations that remain in the Iran nuclear deal meet on Friday for the first time since U.S. President Donald Trump left the pact, but diplomats see limited scope to salvage it after Washington vowed to be tougher than ever on Tehran. British, Chinese, French, German and Russian officials will try to flesh out with Iran’s deputy foreign minister a strategy to save the deal by keeping oil and investment flowing, while circumventing U.S. sanctions that risk hurting the economy. The 2015 accord rests on lifting sanctions and allowing business with Iran in exchange for Tehran curbing its nuclear program. The …

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U.S. tech companies would be forced to disclose if they allowed American adversaries, like Russia and China, to examine the inner workings of software sold to the U.S. military under proposed legislation, Senate staff told Reuters on Thursday. The bill, approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, comes after a year-long Reuters investigation found software makers allowed a Russian defense agency to hunt for vulnerabilities in software that was already deeply embedded in some of the most sensitive parts of the U.S. government, including the Pentagon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and intelligence agencies. Security experts say allowing …

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French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday said he would travel to Russia for the soccer World Cup if France reach the semifinals, turning a deaf ear to calls from human rights groups to boycott the tournament. Human rights groups calling for the boycott over Russia’s involvement in Syria’s civil war met with Macron’s advisers earlier this week, saying it would send a strong symbolic message if the 40-year-old leader did not attend the World Cup. “If the French team passes beyond the quarterfinals I will come and support,” Macron said during a joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin. …

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The Kremlin on Thursday said that Alfa Bank principals were not representing interests of the Kremlin or President Vladimir Putin at a recent closed-door meeting with the leadership of a major Washington think tank. VOA reported Wednesday that the Atlantic Council hosted an off-the-record round-table dinner for two oligarchs listed on a U.S. Treasury-issued registry of 210 wealthy Russians identified as close to Putin, which was published in January.  The private event, which was internally billed as an open-ended discussion about “the Russian economy in an era of escalating sanctions,” featured billionaire bankers Pyotr Aven and Mikhail Fridman of the previously …

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The International Atomic Energy Agency said Thursday Iran is complying with restrictions on its nuclear program in accord with the 2015 international agreement. The inspectors’ assessment is the first since U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the pact. The United Nations atomic watchdog said Tehran is staying within limits on the level to which it can enrich uranium, the size of its stock of enriched uranium and other strictures. But it chided Iran for limiting “complementary access” inspections. The U.N. assessment came as the U.S. imposed new sanctions on Iran in an effort to force the Islamic …

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International investigators looking into the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in July 2014 have identified the Russian military brigade they believe owned the missile that was used to bring down the airliner. Henry Ridgwell reports from London. …

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