Category: Євросоюз

Opponents of Silvio Berlusconi accused the former prime minister on Monday of being to blame for a surge in migrants to Italy in recent years as campaigning for a national election turned increasingly ugly. The build up to the March 4 vote was shaken at the weekend when a neo-Nazi shot and injured six African migrants in central Italy, in a racially motivated attack after a Nigerian man was arrested on suspicion of murdering a local teenager. While denouncing the gunman as “insane,” Berlusconi, whose center-right coalition is leading in the opinion polls, on Sunday adopted a new, hardline on …

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Israel’s education minister is set to visit Warsaw amid uproar over proposed legislation that would outlaw blaming Poland for crimes committed during the Holocaust. Naftali Bennett said Monday he would “make it clear: the past can’t be rewritten, the future should be written together.” The bill sparked outrage in Israel, raising tensions with a close ally. It calls for up to three years in prison for any intentional attempt to falsely attribute crimes of Nazi Germany to the Polish state or people. Israel sees it as an attempt to whitewash the role some Poles played in the killing of Jews …

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British officials reacted angrily Monday to President Donald Trump’s stark criticism of the U.K. health care system, which he said was breaking down. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said he is proud of the National Health Service and rejected Trump’s claim that it’s collapsing. The “NHS may have challenges but I’m proud to be from the country that invented universal coverage – where all get care no matter the size of their bank balance,” he said. Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn called Trump’s comments “wrong” and said Britons love the NHS. The latest dispute between Trump and Britain started when Trump criticized …

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Russia sentenced 43 people to jail over online posts last year, a rights group said Monday, warning that the country is slowly criminalizing internet use as the security service tightens its grip. The Agora rights group presented a report in Moscow on “the creeping criminalization of the internet,” in which it registered 115,706 cases of restrictions on internet freedom last year. The report said there was a rise in physical attacks and criminal convictions, with the 43 people sentenced to prison in 2017 up from 32 in 2016. In a new trend, five people were placed in isolation in psychiatric …

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Prime Minister Theresa May’s office underscored Monday that Britain will not remain in a customs union with the European Union after the U.K. breaks with the 28-nation bloc. After a weekend of conflicting statements from government officials, a source in May’s office, speaking only on customary condition of anonymity, told British media that it is not their policy to be in a customs union. The comment comes as Britain seeks to clarify its position ahead of a new round of talks between Britain and the EU. May’s party has been split between those who want a complete break from the …

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Ukrainian opposition leader Mikheil Saakashvili on Monday said an appeals court rejected his appeal for protection against possible extradition in a decision he said was politically motivated. The former president of Georgia entered Ukraine last September despite being stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship in a protracted standoff with the Kyev authorities, whom he accuses of corruption. He is wanted in Georgia on four charges including abuse of office, which he says are trumped up. The Ukrainian court upheld an earlier ruling to deny him the status of a person in need of additional protection. “This is yet another decision by …

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Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades won reelection to second five-year term Sunday, promising to continue economic recovery and the island’s reunification efforts. The conservative Anastasiades beat his leftist challenger Stavros Malas 56 to 44 percent. The two also faced-off in the 2013 election. “I will continue to be president for all Cypriots,” Anastasiades told cheering supporters in Nicosia. “Tonight, there are no winners of losers. There is only a Cyprus for all of us.” Malas told his backers they can be disappointed, but said “the battle” does not begin or end with a single election. He said he telephoned Anastasiades and …

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Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in Athens Sunday to protest a potential compromise between Greece and Macedonia over a long-standing name dispute. Police estimated a crowd size of about 140,000, while organizers of the march claimed 1.5 million people from Greece and the Greek diaspora gathered to urge the government against brokering a deal regarding neighboring Macedonia’s official name. “The million protesters that the organizers imagined was wishful thinking,” Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said in a statement released by his office. “The crushing majority of Greek people conclude that foreign policy issues should not be dealt with with …

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After nearly two years in solitary confinement at a maximum security jail, the top surviving suspect of the deadliest terror attack in recent French history goes on trial Monday in Brussels. The four-day trial of 28-year-old Salah Abdeslam will not deal directly with the November 2015 attacks that killed 130 people around Paris, but rather a shootout with police months later. But it is being closely watched, in hopes it may shed insight into the tangle of alliances and events that link the Paris attacks with the March 2016 attacks on the Brussels airport and metro. The trial may turn …

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U.S. President Donald Trump is contending that a controversial memo alleging that the FBI abused its power in probing Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election “totally vindicates” him, but that view was challenged Sunday by one of the memo’s own authors. Trump complained in a Saturday Twitter comment that the “Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!” But Congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, one of the key …

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IOC President Thomas Bach has strongly criticized the midweek ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport that lifted Olympic doping bans for 28 Russian athletes, calling it “extremely disappointing and surprising.” “The IOC, we would never have expected this,” Bach said Sunday in Pyeongchang, where the Winter Olympics start Friday. “We feel that this decision shows the urgent need for reforms in the internal structure of CAS.” The CAS ruling on Thursday overturned doping bans on 28 Russians, citing insufficient evidence. Russia said it wanted to send 15 of the 28 to Pyeongchang, including gold medal-winning skeleton slider Alexander …

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Over the last decades, growing economic hardships forced people in cities and villages around the world to leave their hometowns to find work in other countries. Dreaming of returning one day and enjoying a better life where they grew up, many invested most of their savings buying houses back home. But often, these houses remain empty, making many communities look like ghost towns. Faiza Elmasry has the story. Faith Lapidus narrates. …

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Turkish guards at the border with Syria are indiscriminately shooting at and summarily returning asylum seekers attempting to cross into Turkey, Human Rights Watch said. A senior Turkish government official denied the report Saturday, repeating that Turkey had taken in 3.5 million war refugees since the Syrian conflict began in 2011. New York-based Human Rights Watch said Syrians were now fleeing heightened violence in the northwestern province of Idlib to seek refuge near Turkey’s border, which remains closed to all but critical medical cases. Syrian armed forces have thrust deeper into the mainly rebel-held province in recent months, and Turkey last month launched military action in the nearby Afrin region, …

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Russian oligarchs suspected of corruption will be forced to explain their wealth in Britain, The Times newspaper reported on February 3, quoting the security minister. …

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Poland is seeing a resurgence of anti-Semitism over pending legislation that would impose jail terms for suggestions that the nation was complicit in the Holocaust, local minority groups warned, as pressure mounts on the president to veto the bill. Parliament passed the measure Thursday, drawing outrage from Israel, U.S. criticism and condemnation from a number of international organizations. President Andrzej Duda has 21 days to decide whether to sign it into law. The bill would impose prison sentences of up to three years for mentioning the term “Polish death camps” and for suggesting “publicly and against the facts” complicity on the part of the Polish nation or state in …

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A lone Italian gunman shot and wounded six African immigrants Saturday in a two-hour drive-by shooting spree, authorities said, terrorizing a small city in central Italy where a Nigerian man was arrested days earlier in a teenager’s gruesome killing. The shooting suspect, a man alleged to have right-wing political ties, had an Italian flag tied around his neck as he was arrested hours later in Macerata. Authorities identified him as Luca Traini, a 28-year-old Italian with no previous record. Traini had run for town council on the anti-migrant Northern League’s ticket in a local election last year in Corridonia, the …

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Greek Cypriots are gearing up for a presidential runoff Sunday, barely seven months after the latest failure to reunify the eastern Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus. President Nicos Anastasiades is looking to reprise his triumph over left-leaning Stavros Malas in 2013 when the two men faced each other. Earlier polls had shown Anastasiades beating Malas convincingly in Sunday’s runoff, but Malas’ strong showing in last weekend’s first round of voting might make it a closer race. Voters are skeptical about whether anyone can lead them out of the labyrinth of the decades-old division with Turkish Cypriots. Cyprus was divided into …

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Britain has made clear its desire to be part of China’s so-called ‘One Belt One Road Initiative’ — a cornerstone of President Xi Jinping’s vision to boost Chinese investment and influence across Asia, Europe and Africa. There are, however, concerns over the financial and humanitarian costs of the vast infrastructure projects being undertaken. As Henry Ridgwell reports, the United States has issued a blunt warning over what it sees as the dangers of being tied to China’s huge investment projects. …

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A record-setting Russian spacewalk ended with a critical antenna in the wrong position Friday outside the International Space Station. NASA’s Mission Control reported that the antenna was still working. Nevertheless, Russian space officials were convening a special team to see whether further action would be necessary. The antenna is used for communications with Russia’s Mission Control outside Moscow. The trouble arose toward the end of the more than 8 hour spacewalk — the longest ever by Russians and the fifth longest overall — after Commander Alexander Misurkin and Anton Shkaplerov successfully replaced an electronics box to upgrade the antenna. Antenna …

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The Pentagon has released its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, adding nuclear capabilities and updating the United States’ current arsenal in order to deter nuclear attacks. “What we’re trying to do is ensure that our diplomats and our negotiators are in a position to be listened to when we say we want to go forward on nonproliferation and arms control,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters ahead of the review’s release Friday. “You have to do that when you’re in a position of persuasion, not of hoping.” U.S. President Donald Trump said he ordered Mattis to conduct the Nuclear Posture Review …

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