Category: Євросоюз

The United States is participating in the 23rd Conference of the Parties (COP-23) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, despite President Donald Trump’s announcement it will be leaving the Paris Climate Accords. The State Department says a U.S. delegation is participating in the conference in Bonn, Germany. A State Department statement Monday said, “The United States remains a Party in good standing to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and is participating in ongoing negotiations under the Framework Convention as well as the Paris Agreement, in order to ensure a level playing field that benefits and protects …

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Irish musician and anti-poverty activist Bob Geldof returned his “Freedom of the City of Dublin” award to his hometown Monday, saying he cannot hold an honor also given to Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi. “I am a very proud Dubliner but cannot in all conscience continue to be one of the honored few to have received this great tribute whilst Aung San Suu Kyi remains amongst that number,” Geldof said in a statement. “In short, I do not wish to be associated in any way with an individual currently engaged in the mass ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people of …

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met Monday with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, the fourth encounter between the two leaders this year and part of a warming of relations in the wake of tensions following Turkey’s 2015 downing of a Russian warplane operating from a Syrian air base.   But analysts say despite recent images of smiles and warm handshakes between the two leaders, cracks in that rapprochement are starting to show and signs of tension remain. “Putin and Erdogan, they don’t trust each other, particularly true on the part of Putin. He sees …

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European Union foreign and defense ministers from 23 of the 28 member countries, signed a landmark defense agreement Monday in Brussels aimed to boost post-Brexit cooperation within the bloc and to counter Russian pressure. To become EU law, leaders of the bloc must endorse it in December. The agreement envisions a Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO, which is intended to give the European Union a more coherent role in tackling international crises, follows the announcement of a $6.4-billion European Defense Fund last June. It pledges that countries will provide “substantial support” in such areas as personnel, equipment, training, and infrastructure …

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Two former U.S. intelligence officials slammed President Trump Sunday for saying believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin “feels that he and Russia did not meddle” in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Former CIA director John Brennan, in an appearance on CNN with James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, said Trump’s initial indication that he believed Putin shows “that Donald Trump can be played by foreign leaders who are going to appeal to his ego and try to play upon his insecurities, which is very, very worrisome from a national security standpoint.” Clapper said Russia poses and obvious threat …

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Support for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives has fallen to the lowest level in more than six years, according to a poll on Sunday, as they prepare for more talks on a coalition deal with the environmentalist Greens and a pro-business party. The weekly Emnid survey for Bild am Sonntag newspaper showed only 30 percent would vote for Merkel’s CDU/CSU bloc if there were a federal election this Sunday, down 1 percentage point. This is the lowest reading for the conservatives in this survey since October 2011 and marks a slump in support since the Sept. 24 election, in which Merkel’s …

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The Kremlin said on Sunday that inflexibility on the part of the United States was to blame for the lack of a bilateral meeting between Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump during a summit in Vietnam. Trump and Putin met briefly on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam on Saturday and agreed on a joint statement supporting a political solution for Syria, but did not hold substantive bilateral talks. “Unfortunately the American side did not offer any alternatives despite all efforts of our Russian colleagues. There was only one time offered that was …

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Israel signaled on Sunday that it would keep up military strikes across its frontier with Syria to prevent any encroachment by Iranian-allied forces, even as the United States and Russia try to build up a cease-fire in the area. U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday affirmed joint efforts to stabilize Syria as its civil war wanes, including with the expansion of a July 7 truce in the southwestern triangle bordering Israel and Jordan. A U.S. State Department official said Russia had agreed “to work with the Syrian regime to remove Iranian-backed forces a defined distance” …

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In his first visit to Catalonia since imposing direct rule, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy called for a strong turnout in the December 21 Catalan elections. “We want to bring back the Catalonia that belongs to everyone with democracy and freedom, we will achieve this if the silent majority turns its voice into a vote,” he said Sunday. His visit to Barcelona comes one day after Catalonia’s battered independence movement staged a massive protest in the city, demanding the release of jailed leaders and recognition of a separate Catalan Republic. Rajoy is expected to make a campaign appearance in Barcelona …

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Iran’s nuclear deal is “not negotiable,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bassam Ghassemi said Saturday in response to remarks by the French president. Emmanuel Macron called for vigilance toward Tehran over its ballistic missile program and regional activities, in an interview published Wednesday by the Emirati daily Al-Ittihad. “We have told French leaders on several occasions that the Iran nuclear deal is not negotiable and that no other issues can be included in the text” of the 2015 agreement, state news agency IRNA quoted Ghassemi as saying. France, the Foreign Ministry speaker said, is “fully aware of our country’s intangible position …

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Spanish authorities said they rescued 251 migrants, including children, on Saturday who were making the perilous Mediterranean crossing to Europe. The people were saved “from five improvised vessels, all in the Alboran Sea,” Spain’s maritime safety authorities said on Twitter, referring to the westernmost portion of the Mediterranean Sea. The number of migrants arriving by sea on Spanish shores has soared over last year, with the figure nearly tripling to 15,585 in 2017 by November 8, according to the International Organization for Migration. Many Africans undertaking the long route to Europe are choosing to avoid crossing danger-ridden Libya to get …

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Carrying Polish flags and throwing red smoke bombs, tens of thousands of people on Saturday joined a march in Warsaw organized by far-right nationalists to mark independence day, while counterprotesters rallied against fascism. The annual march also attracted a considerable number of supporters of the governing conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party to honor the re-establishment of Poland’s independence in 1918. This year’s slogan was “We Want God,” which 21-year-old Pawel from the southern city of Rzeszow said was “important because religion is important in our country and we don’t want Islamization, of Europe or especially Poland.” Those marching chanted …

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Catalonia’s battered independence movement staged a massive protest Saturday in Barcelona, demanding the release of jailed leaders and recognition of a separate Catalan republic. Spain’s central government imposed direct rule on Catalonia immediately after its regional parliament voted for independence on October 27. It arrested dozens of secessionist politicians, causing the head of the regional government, Carles Puigdemont, to flee to Belgium. Relatives of eight jailed members of the dissolved regional government and two jailed activists headed the march, carrying banners with their portraits. Those imprisoned without bail include Catalan Vice President Oriol Junqueras. The head of the regional parliament …

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Hope Solo, the U.S. women’s soccer (football) team’s standout goalkeeper, says that former FIFA president Sepp Blatter sexually assaulted her in 2013 at an awards event. Blatter denied allegations Saturday that he had grabbed her backside, calling them “absurd.” Speaking with Portuguese newspaper Expresso on Friday, the 36-year-old Solo said that the then-FIFA president had made his advance just before she was about to present an award to her teammate Abby Wambach at the Ballon d’Or ceremony. Solo, a World Cup winner and two-time Olympic champion, said that sexual harassment at the hands of male officials was a common problem …

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President Vladimir Putin is promising that Russia will retaliate for what he calls attacks on Russian media in the United States. Putin’s comments at a news conference Saturday in Vietnam follow complaints by the Kremlin-funded RT satellite TV channel that the U.S. Justice Department has ordered it to register as a foreign agent by Monday. Putin says “attacking our media in the United States is an attack on freedom of speech, without any doubt,” and promised to retaliate. RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan said the station would register, since otherwise its American director could be arrested and its accounts frozen. She …

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For Sherpa, a scrappy French monitoring group that is thinly staffed, no multinational is too powerful, and no head of state untouchable as it seeks economic and social change through the courts. It accuses a major bank of complicity in Rwanda’s genocide and a cement manufacturer of helping to finance terrorism in Syria. It has gone after African leaders, mining companies and even a supermarket chain for activities that allegedly impoverish communities and violate human rights. “I think we are the demonstration that small is beautiful,” Sherpa’s founder, lawyer William Bourdon, said in his Paris office. Sherpa teamed up with …

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The presidents of the U.S. and Russia have approved a joint statement on Syria, agreeing that “there is no military solution to the conflict.” Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin approved the statement on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Vietnam. Russian officials said Putin and Trump had a conversation before the group photo ceremony for APEC leaders in Danang. The White House did not immediately respond to questions about the Kremlin announcement or the conversation the Kremlin said took place.  In the statement the two world leaders repeated the urgency of destroying the Islamic State and …

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Some foreign students in U.S. schools find it challenging to submit grammatically correct, idiomatically accurate papers. So two former Ukrainian graduate students launched an artificial intelligence-driven grammar-proofing program that goes well beyond spell-check. Today, their 8-year-old startup, Grammarly, whose first venture round netted $110 million in May, has offices in Ukraine and the U.S. VOA Ukrainian Service correspondent Tatiana Vorozhko has the story. …

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From Queen Elizabeth to U2 frontman Bono, the leak of more than 14 million documents from firms involved in offshore finance, known as the Paradise Papers, has engulfed some of the world’s most famous names. One country appears more than most in the papers: Britain. Campaigners say weak regulation means Britain is at the center of the secretive industry, and its decision to leave the European Union is making things worse, as Henry Ridgwell reports from London. …

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Turkey’s increasingly fractious relations with some key Western allies are taking a growing financial toll amid investor concerns, analysts warn. Although the lira surged Monday on news that Turkey and the United States had resolved a dispute over the detention of some of Washington’s local employees in Turkey, the currency plummeted Tuesday following apparently contradictory statements by both sides. The currency gyrations linked to diplomatic tensions are increasingly becoming the norm. In the space of a couple of months, Turkey’s lira fell sharply on news that a reporter working for a U.S. newspaper was convicted in absentia on terrorism charges. …

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