Category: Євросоюз

Denmark intends to invest to boost efforts to prevent cyber attacks in a strategy to be presented early next year, its defense minister said on Tuesday. “We are going to spend more money in this area,” Claus Hjort Frederiksen told Reuters on the sidelines of a conference in Copenhagen, though he declined to disclose a figure. Cybersecurity is “very high on the agenda” for the right-leaning government, but also for the broad selection of Danish political parties negotiating a new defense strategy for the coming six years, he said. The government would like to expand an early warning system with …

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The European Union’s top court Monday ordered Poland to stop logging in the ancient Bialowieza Forest, or pay an $118,000 daily fine. “Poland must immediately cease its active forest management operations in the Bialowieza Forest, except in exceptional cases where they are strictly necessary to ensure public safety,” the European Court of Justice wrote. The forest is home to rare plants, birds and mammals and is one of Europe’s last remaining primeval habitats. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The court first warned Poland against logging in July. Poland says the trees are weak and damaged by a beetle …

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The European Union went back to its roots Monday by picking cities from two of its founding nations — France and the Netherlands — to host key agencies that will have move once Britain leaves the bloc in 2019. During voting so tight they were both decided by a lucky draw, EU members except Britain chose Amsterdam over Italy’s Milan as the new home of the European Medicines Agency and Paris over Dublin to host the European Banking Authority. Both currently are located in London. “We needed to draw lots in both cases,” Estonian EU Affairs Minister Matti Maasikas, who …

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Germany has been plunged into political crisis after coalition talks between Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and two smaller parties broke down. Analysts say the indecisive election result in September has revealed a splintering of German society and politics, posing a serious challenge to Chancellor Merkel. As Henry Ridgwell reports from London, the political chaos could have a much wider impact on issues like climate talks and European Union reform. …

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Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would prefer a new election to ruling with a minority after talks on forming a three-way coalition failed overnight, but Germany’s president told parties they owed it to voters to try to form a government. The major obstacle to a three-way deal was immigration, according to Merkel, who was forced into negotiations after bleeding support in the September 24 election to the far right in a backlash at her 2015 decision to let in over 1 million migrants. The failure of exploratory coalition talks involving her conservative bloc, the liberal pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) and …

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A lawyer for Gen. Ratko Mladic said Monday it is not certain the former Bosnian Serb military commander will show up in a United Nations courtroom when judges deliver their verdicts in his long-running trial for allegedly masterminding atrocities during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.   Mladic’s attorneys have filed a flurry of recent motions to have the ailing 75-year-old’s health assessed before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia announces it decisions Wednesday.   He was tried on 11 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.   Mladic’s trial is the last to end at the ground-breaking tribunal …

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Germany — the most stable European Union country — was plunged into a political crisis Monday. Weeks-long exploratory talks over forming Germany’s next coalition government collapsed with all four parties involved at loggerheads over migration and energy policies as well as on further European Union integration.  Chancellor Angela Merkel was due Monday to meet the country’s president, but it remained unclear whether she will try to run a minority government, forestalling a snap parliamentary election, or recommend heading to the polls early next year. The news of the collapse of the talks sent the euro sliding in overnight Asian markets …

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she will consult Monday with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier after weeks of talks to form a coalition government fell apart with one potential partner withdrawing from the process. “It is at least a day of deep reflection on how to go forward in Germany,” Merkel told reporters. “But I will do everything possible to ensure that this country will be well led through these difficult weeks.” She spoke after the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) decided to exit a possible coalition with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, along …

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One-third of the newest crop of Rhodes Scholars from the United States are African-Americans, the most ever elected in a U.S. Rhodes class. Of the 100 Rhodes Scholars chosen worldwide for advanced study at Oxford in Britain each year, 32 come from the United States, and this time, 10 of those are African Americans. One of them is Simone Askew, the first black female student to head the Corps of Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy. Other American scholars include a transgender man and students from U.S. colleges that had never had a student win a spot in the Rhodes …

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Germany’s would-be coalition partners appeared to have reached an impasse over immigration policy as a self-imposed Sunday evening deadline for agreeing the outlines of a government program passed with no deal. A deadline of 1700 GMT passed with no announcement being made, suggesting Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens had been unable to agree the painful compromises needed to wrap up talks, which appear set to continue. The reluctant partners were forced to pursue the three-way tie-up, untested at national level, by voters who deserted the main parties of left and right in a …

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The U.S. ambassador to Russia has attacked Moscow’s move toward forcing nine United States government-funded news operations to register as “foreign agents” as “a reach beyond” what the U.S. government did in requiring the Kremlin-funded RT television network to register as such in the United States. Ambassador Jon Huntsman said during a visit Friday to the Moscow bureau of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that the Russian reaction is not “reciprocal at all” and Moscow’s move toward regulation of the news agencies, if it is implemented, would make “it virtually impossible for them to operate” in …

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The U.S. ambassador to Russia on Sunday attacked Moscow’s move toward forcing nine United States government-funded news operations to register as “foreign agents” as “a reach beyond” what the U.S. government did in requiring the Kremlin-funded RT television network to register as such in the United States. Ambassador Jon Huntsman said the Russian reaction is not “reciprocal at all” and Moscow’s move toward regulation of the news agencies, if it is implemented, would make “it virtually impossible for them to operate” in Russia. WATCH: Ambassador Jon Huntsman He said the eight-decade-old Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) under which RT has …

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Turkey’s Foreign Minister Melvin Cavusolgu is hosting his Russian and Iranian counterparts at the Mediterranean Sea resort of Antalya to prepare the ground for Wednesday’s summit in Russia to discuss Syria. Despite Ankara backing opposing sides to Tehran and Moscow in the Syrian civil war, they have been increasingly cooperating to resolve the conflict. The three countries armed forces are deployed in creating a “de-escalation zone” in the Syrian enclave of Idlib, one of last strongholds of rebels fighting the Damascus regime. Despite growing cooperation, the countries competing agendas are increasingly coming to the fore with the imminent defeat of …

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The Turkish capital Ankara has banned the public showing of films and exhibitions related to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues, the governor’s office said on Sunday, citing risks to public safety. The move is likely to deepen concern among rights activists and Turkey’s Western allies about its record on civil liberties under President Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted AK Party. “Starting from Nov. 18, 2017, concerning our community’s public sensitivity, any events such as LGBT… cinema, theatre, panels, interviews, exhibitions are banned until further notice in our province to provide peace and security,” the governor’s office said in a statement. …

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Britain will submit its proposals on how to settle its financial obligations to the European Union before an EU Council meeting next month, finance minister Philip Hammond said on Sunday. British Prime Minister Theresa May was told on Friday that there was more work to be done to unlock Brexit talks, as the European Union repeated an early December deadline for her to move on the divorce bill. “We will make our proposals to the European Union in time for the council,” Hammond told the BBC. Last week, May met fellow leaders on the sidelines of an EU summit in …

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Celebrating Mass with poor people, Pope Francis is denouncing “indifference” as a great sin. St. Peter’s Basilica on Sunday was filled with poor people as well as prelates as the Catholic church marked its first “World Day for the Poor.” Francis decried those who contend that poverty’s “not my business, it’s society’s fault.” He told faithful that a lifetime of “doing nothing wrong isn’t enough” and called helping the world’s poor the “passport for Paradise.” He said people will enter Heaven “not for what you have, but for what you give” to the needy. Francis has invited 1,200 poor people …

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Gerry Adams, the divisive politician known around the world as the face of the Irish republican movement as it shifted from violence to peace, announced Saturday that he was stepping down as leader of Sinn Fein next year after heading the party for over 30 years. The 69-year-old veteran politician — who has been president of Northern Ireland’s second-largest party since 1983 — told the party’s annual conference in Dublin he would not run in the next Irish parliamentary elections. “Leadership means knowing when it is time for change and that time is now,” he said, adding the move was …

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Fotis Kafatos, a Greek molecular biologist who had a distinguished academic career in both the United States and Europe and became the founding president of the European Research Council, has died. He was 77. His family announced his death in Heraklion, Crete, on Saturday “after a long illness.” Born in Crete in 1940, Kafatos was known for his research on malaria and for sequencing the genome of the mosquito that transmits the disease. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1969 to 1994, where he also served as chairman of the Cellular and Developmental Biology Department, and at Imperial …

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Turkish prosecutors launched an investigation Saturday of two U.S. prosecutors involved in putting a Turkish-Iranian businessman on trial for allegedly violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, according to Turkey’s official news agency. The Istanbul prosecutor’s office said it was investigating Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Bharara’s successor, acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim. A statement from the Istanbul prosecutor’s office said the sources of the documents and wiretaps being used as evidence in the U.S. case against gold trader Reza Zarrab were unknown and violated international and domestic laws. Turkey’s official Anadolu …

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Ukraine officials have arrested a man who is considered a suspect in the 2004 shooting death of Paul Klebnikov, the editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine. Ukraine’s state Security Service said in a statement Saturday that it had detained a suspect, a Russian man, who was also wanted in other slayings. The man was arrested in Kyiv. “According to Interpol, the foreigner participated in a series of sponsored murders, in particular that of Forbes’ editor-in-chief, the U.S. citizen Paul Khlebnikov,” as well as a Chechen government official, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) statement said. It did not …

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