Category: Євросоюз

The standoff between Madrid and supporters of independence in Spain’s wealthy Catalan region has stirred separatist feelings far beyond the Spanish borders. Politicians across the globe criticized armed Spanish police who used truncheons and rubber bullets on voters, injuring hundreds in a crackdown on Sunday’s secession vote, considered illegal under Spain’s 1978 Constitution. Several politicians from regions with their own separatist movements said it was time for politics to resolve the crisis in the euro zone’s fourth-biggest economy. Catalan leaders said the result showed its people wanted to leave Spain and it would push ahead with secession. Madrid has ruled …

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Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted Saudi Arabia’s King Salman for talks in Moscow on Thursday in the first official visit of a Saudi monarch to Russia that was expected to focus on oil and the war in Syria. At the Kremlin’s opulent St. Andrew’s Hall, Putin in televised remarks hailed the king’s visit as a “landmark” event. Salman in his reply called Russia a “friendly nation” and said his country is committed to strengthen ties “in the interests of peace and security.” Relations between the two countries have often been strained. During Cold War times, the Saudis helped arm Afghan …

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Saudi Arabia’s King Salman is in Moscow for the first ever visit by a Saudi monarch to Russia. During the four-day visit, the king is scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin for talks on issues ranging from oil to Syria. The visit reflect strengthening ties between two historic rivals, pushed closer by a mutual need to stem the drop in global oil prices. The rivalry between two of the world’s largest oil producers goes back to the Cold War when the Saudis helped arm Afghan rebels fighting against the Soviet invasion.   More recently, tensions were high over …

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As Moscow’s propaganda efforts targeting Americans are under scrutiny by Congress, some lawmakers are pushing for increased support for U.S. government-funded broadcasting in Russia. Lawmakers issued the calls Wednesday during a meeting of the Helsinki Commission, an independent U.S. government agency that monitors democracy and human rights in Europe. “A free press is now more important than ever, and absolutely necessary to counter an increasingly bold [Russian President] Vladimir Putin,” said Congressman Steve Chabot. The hearing came hours after the Senate Intelligence Committee briefed the public on its ongoing investigation into attempted Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. …

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Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny called on his supporters on Wednesday to hold street protests this weekend across Russia, in defiance of an official ban, to demand that Navalny be allowed to run in next year’s presidential election. Navalny, a vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin, was jailed for 20 days on Monday for repeatedly violating laws governing the organization of public meetings and rallies. His arrest, the third this year, means that he will miss a campaign rally planned in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg on Oct. 7 — the Russian leader’s birthday. Appealing to his supporters via his Facebook …

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Russian President Vladimir Putin has hosted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, hailing him for reaching out to the opposition.   Speaking at the start of their Kremlin talks, Putin noted that “Venezuela is going through uneasy times” and credited Maduro with “succeeding in establishing some contact” with opposition forces.   Venezuela’s opposition insists that any solution to the nation’s protracted economic and political crisis requires Maduro to step down. However, the embattled socialist has shown no sign of ceding power and accused opponents of plotting with the U.S. to remove him by force.   During the Kremlin meeting, Maduro thanked Putin …

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The European Commission on Wednesday stepped up legal action against Hungary over restrictions on foreign funding likely to affect civil society groups funded by the billionaire investor George Soros. The EU executive believes the law, passed in June, violates the right to freedom of association and to protection of private life and personal data enshrined in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, as well as breaching the principle of free movement of capital. Hungary’s right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orban, has long criticized organizations funded by the Hungarian-born Soros, accusing them of working as paid activists advocating Soros’s political goals, notably …

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In a historic, unprecedented move, a Georgian political party has nominated an openly gay candidate for public office. Running on the non-parliamentary opposition Republican Party ticket, Nino Bolkvadze, a 40-year-old lawyer and LGBT rights advocate, is seeking a city councillorship in Tbilisi, the nation’s capital and largest city. “I want Georgia to be a better place for my children,” said Bolkvadze, a single mother of two teenage girls who was shunned by her family for coming out on the country’s most popular TV show two years ago. Established by dissidents some four decades ago and once outlawed by the Soviet …

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The Russian Foreign Ministry, saying U.S. officials had broken into residences at Russia’s consulate in San Francisco, has threatened retaliation over what it called an illegal act. Russian staff left the consulate last month, after Washington ordered Moscow to vacate some of its diplomatic properties. The moves were part of a series of tit-for-tat actions during a thorny phase in bilateral relations. Since then, U.S. officials had occupied administrative parts of the compound, but on Monday they entered residential areas that the departing staff had locked, the ministry said in a statement late Monday. “Despite our warnings, the U.S. authorities …

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Spain’s King Felipe VI has condemned the Catalan authorities, saying they placed themselves “outside the law” by holding an independence vote Sunday. In a television address to the nation Tuesday, the king called for unity even as thousands took to the streets across Spain’s northeastern province to protest a Spanish police crackdown during the referendum. Separatist Catalan leaders have vowed to declare independence even though Madrid has declared the vote illegal and invalid. Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont told the BBC such a declaration could come within days. Catalan labor unions called for a general strike to voice anger about the …

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The prime ministers of Bulgaria, Greece and Romania gave their support to their Balkan neighbor Serbia’s bid to join the European Union on Tuesday, saying the integration of the western Balkans would guarantee regional peace and stability. Serbia, which in the 1990s was seen as pariah of Western Balkans for its central role in wars that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia, expects to complete negotiations on EU membership by 2019. “All of us know that the natural place of Serbia is in the European Union,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov said after a four-party summit in the Black Sea city …

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French President Emmanuel Macron has used a visit to an ailing Whirlpool factory that had become a symbol of the battle for jobs as an opportunity to promote his economic policies. The dryer factory in Amiens, northern France, was during the presidential campaign in April the site of what became known as the “battle of Whirlpool.” At the time, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen had upstaged Macron with a surprise visit to the factory, which was threatened with closure. That prompted Macron to meet with angry workers: he was booed at first, but stood his ground, patiently debating about how …

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The European Union insisted Tuesday that Brexit negotiations with Britain will not move on to the question of future relations until enough progress has been made on divorce issues, such as how much the country’s exit bill should be. Britain desperately wants talks to move on to future trade and security arrangements but EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said that more needs to be done on the withdrawal issues first. Juncker told the European Parliament that “we have not made the sufficient progress needed” and the legislators backed him, approving a resolution underscoring the same point with a vote of …

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The new U.S. ambassador to Russia presented his diplomatic credentials to President Vladimir Putin at a ceremony in the Kremlin, a move that marks the formal start of Jon Huntsman’s work in Russia.   Huntsman, who has twice served as a U.S. ambassador, arrived in Moscow on Sunday to take over from John Tefft who left Russia two days earlier after serving in Russia for three years, a period that was marred by a deep and rapid deterioration of ties, unseen since the end of the Cold War. The relationship soured even further in recent months following a series of …

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Several thousand protesters gathered Tuesday outside the Barcelona headquarters of Spain’s National Police to protest alleged brutality by police during a disputed referendum on Catalonia’s secession that left hundreds of people injured. The crowd gathered in the Catalan capital, shouting slogans calling Spanish police an “occupying force” and urging them to leave the northeastern region.   The protest came as several small labor unions and grassroots pro-independence groups urged workers throughout Catalonia to go on partial or full-day strikes and as the region’s leaders ponder a possible declaration of independence, two days after the referendum that turned violent and that …

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Scientists Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne have won the Nobel Prize in physics for their work in detecting gravitational waves. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the award Tuesday along with its $1.1 million prize. Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicted the existence of gravitational waves that are created anytime a mass accelerates, but it was not until recently that the waves were actually observed. Weiss, Barish and Thorne were key figures in the work done by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which measures tiny disturbances the waves make to space and time as they …

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Police in Las Vegas, Nevada say a man opened fire on a country music concert late Sunday, killing 59 people and wounding 527 others, in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. An edited list of mass shootings that have taken place in other parts of the world: Paris, France November, 2015 Terrorists claiming allegiance to Islamic State carried out several coordinated attacks in the city, including shootings of pedestrians on the street and a mass shootings at the Bataclan theatre. One hundred and thirty people were killed in the combined attacks. Paris, France January, 2015 Islamist gunmen stormed …

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The Vatican’s secretary of state is headlining an international conference on protecting children from online sexual abuse and exploitation, weeks after he recalled one of his diplomats who was caught up in a U.S.-Canadian-Vatican investigation into child porn. Organizers say the arrest warrant issued for Monsignor Carlo Capella showed the need for the conference, which opens Tuesday and ends Friday, when participants bring a set of proposals to Pope Francis. Cardinal Pietro Parolin will deliver the keynote address, while panelists include leading researchers in public health and law enforcement as well as executives from Facebook and Microsoft — evidence of …

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British finance minister Philip Hammond defended capitalism as the only route to prosperity on Monday, in an attempt to counter the opposition Labour Party’s increasingly popular vision for a more centrally-controlled economy. In a speech to the ruling Conservative Party that contained only two new policy announcements, Hammond also said that the government’s immediate task was to deal with the uncertainty for citizens and businesses resulting from Brexit. Prime Minister Theresa May is grappling with deep divisions within her party over how to handle the Brexit talks and serious doubts about her leadership after her botched bet on a June …

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The U.S. Army’s commander in Europe is urging European nations to agree on special transport and border rules so that NATO forces can be quickly moved to deter potential aggressors like Russia. Lt. General Ben Hodges said Monday “the alliance needs to be able to move as quick, or quicker, than Russian Federation forces if we want our deterrent capability to be effective.” Hodges is calling for a “military Schengen,” a reference to Europe’s 26-nation Schengen area where people and goods can cross borders without ID checks. He said NATO needs to know how it can “get that speed within …

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