Category: Євросоюз

A 106-year-old woman thought to be the world’s oldest refugee is set to be deported after being denied asylum in Sweden. Bibihal Uzbeki’s son and grandson carried her on their backs as they fled from Kunduz in northeastern Afghanistan via Iran and Turkey in the hopes of finding haven in Europe. Their journey made headlines in 2015, when they were part of a huge influx of people who came to Europe from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries. They traveled by foot and on trains through the Balkans before reaching Sweden. Two years later, she and her 11 family members …

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In an apparent bid to raise his profile as Russia’s most influential Muslim, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov brought tens of thousands of people to the streets of the capital Grozny on Monday to protest what he called the “genocide of Muslims” in Myanmar. Violence over the past few days in Myanmar’s Rakhine state has killed nearly 400 people and prompted thousands of ethnic Rohingya refugees to flee into neighboring Bangladesh. The Russian government has not been clear in its stance on the Myanmar violence, giving Kadyrov an opportunity to criticize it for inaction. State television footage showed tens of thousands …

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Russian media say Egypt has finalized a deal to build a nuclear power plant with funding from Moscow after nearly two years of negotiations.   The reports Monday came after Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in China, where they were attending a summit.   The nuclear plant will be built in Dabaa, about 130 kilometers (80 miles) northwest of Cairo on the Mediterranean coast.   Egypt’s presidency says el-Sissi has invited Putin to Egypt to mark the start of construction.   In 2015, Egypt signed an agreement with Russia to build a four-reactor power plant. …

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France’s foreign minister is visiting Libya to encourage the implementation of a reconciliation agreement reached by the main Libyan rivals in Paris in July.   Jean-Yves Le Drian met on Monday with Fayez Serraj, the prime minister-designate of the U.N.-backed government, in the capital, Tripoli. He is also visiting Misrata and Benghazi, where he will meet with factions opposed to Serraj.   In July, Serraj and Gen. Khalifa Hifter, the commander of Libya’s self-styled national army, committed to working toward presidential and parliamentary elections and finding a roadmap to secure the lawless country against terrorism and trafficking.   Libya was …

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French President Emmanuel Macron, who last week called Venezuela a dictatorship, will on Monday meet with opposition representatives, including the president and vice-president of the opposition-governed congress, Macron’s office said. The situation in Venezuela has a particular resonance in France, where the far-left France Unbowed party, currently Macron’s most vocal opponent, backs Maduro. Human rights activist Lilian Tintori, the wife of Venezuela’s best-known detained political leader, Leopoldo Lopez, said on Saturday she had been barred from flying out of the country to go to France and other EU capitals. “The dictatorship does not want my voice to be head abroad. …

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The French government said on Thursday it would cap unfair dismissal payouts and give companies more flexibility to adapt pay and working hours to market conditions in a labor reform France’s biggest union said was disappointing. The reform, President Emmanuel Macron’s first major policy step since his election in May, is also the first big test of his plans to reform the euro zone’s second-biggest economy. For decades governments of the left and right have tried to reform France’s strict labor rules, but have always diluted them in the face of street protests. The government said in a document presenting …

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People gathered Thursday at Britain’s Kensington Palace and a site in Paris to mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana. Those paying their respects left flowers and lit candles outside the palace where Diana once lived with her two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry. On Wednesday, William, Harry and William’s wife, Kate, toured a garden at the palace dedicated to Diana. They also met with representatives from some charities Diana supported, as well as some of the well-wishers who had come to remember the late princess. William and Harry were expected to spend Thursday in private. …

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Turkey’s foreign ministry says the country protests “in the harshest way” a U.S. court decision to indict 19 people, including 15 Turkish security officials. The statement published late Wednesday follows Tuesday’s grand jury decision in Washington to charge the defendants with attacking peaceful demonstrators during a visit by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on May 16. Turkey has repeatedly told U.S. officials that security outside the ambassador’s home was negligent and didn’t ensure the safety of Erdogan’s entourage amid sympathizers of an outlawed Kurdish militant group, according to the statement. The ministry called the indictment “biased” and “regretful,” claiming it …

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Moscow and Washington should re-establish direct contacts between their military and foreign policy chiefs, Russia’s new ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, said Wednesday. “The time has come to resume joint meetings of Russia’s and the United States’ foreign and defense ministers in a ‘two plus two’ format,” Antonov said in an interview published on the Kommersant business daily’s website. Military contacts between Moscow and Washington were frozen in 2014 due to the Ukraine crisis. Antonov also called for meetings between the heads of Russia’s Federal Security Service and Foreign Intelligence Service and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central …

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Three weeks before Germany’s election and with at least one poll suggesting nearly half of all voters don’t know what they will do, the government has unveiled an updated online tool to help them decide. Around two dozen young people from around Germany helped launch the “Wahl-O-Mat” (roughly Vote-O-Meter) on Wednesday – a website that matches people with a party after they answer a series of policy questions. One of the first to try was Hubertus Heil, general secretary of the Social Democrats (SPD), junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition. “I got 100 percent,” he beamed after completing …

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The United States has sent a reinforced detachment of fighter planes to police the skies over NATO members Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia during a major Russian military exercise in the Baltic region next month. The Zapad war games, set for September 14-20 in Belarus, western Russia and Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad, have caused unease in the region, though Russia has said the large-scale exercise will rehearse a purely defensive scenario and will not be a springboard for invasion. Seven U.S. F-15C fighters landed at Siauliai airfield this week to patrol skies over the Baltic countries, three more than normally used …

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The Kremlin on Wednesday confirmed that President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer reached out to them during the 2016 presidential campaign, seeking help for a business project in Russia. In a statement to the House Intelligence Committee investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen said Monday the president’s company pursued a project in Moscow during the Republican primary. He said the plan was abandoned for various reasons. President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday that they received Cohen’s email, which …

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday threw her weight behind the European Commission in its row with Warsaw over freedom of Poland’s court system. The previously reticent Merkel, speaking in Berlin, said she took the issue “very seriously” and would talk about it with Commission President Jean-Claude Junker on Wednesday. In July, the commission, the European Union’s executive, gave Warsaw a month to address its concerns about reforms it saw as interfering with an independent judiciary. Warsaw’s reply signaled that the ruling nationalist and euroskeptic Law and Justice (PiS) party had no intention of backing down and even doubted the …

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The Archbishop of Paris is on a 100 million-euro ($120 million) fundraising drive to save the crumbling gargoyles and gothic arches of the storied Notre-Dame cathedral. Every year, 12 million to 14 million people visit the 12th-century Parisian landmark on an island in the Seine river. Groundbreaking for the structure occurred in 1163 and construction was completed in 1345. Pollution and exposure to elements over time have resulted in losses of large chunks of stone. “If we don’t do these restoration works, we’ll risk seeing parts of the exterior structure begin to fall. This is a very serious risk,” said …

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Moroccan authorities have arrested a man suspected of supplying gas canisters to a jihadist cell that carried out a double attack in Catalonia earlier this month that killed 16 people, a source from the Spanish investigation said. The cell accumulated around 120 canisters of butane gas at a house in a town south of Barcelona with which, police say, it planned to carry out a larger bomb attack. Police believe the cell accidentally ignited the explosives on Aug. 16, the eve of the Barcelona attack, triggering a blast that destroyed the house in the town of Alcanar. The remaining attackers …

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday ruled out forming a government coalition after elections with either the far left or the far right. Supporters of the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party jeered her throughout a 30-minute campaign speech in the eastern city of Bitterfeld-Wolfen hours after Merkel declared comments by a top AfD official to be racist. Merkel, whose conservatives have a double-digit lead over the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) in polls ahead of the Sept. 24 elections, also ruled out a coalition with Germany’s far-left Left party. She said the SPD, junior partner in Merkel’s current coalition …

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President Sauli Niinisto on Tuesday denied that Finland was buying new fighter jets from American planemaker Boeing, following remarks by U.S. President Donald Trump. Finland is looking to replace its aging fleet of 62 F/A-18 Hornet jets with multirole fighter aircraft in a procurement estimated at 7-10 billion euros by 2025. “One of the things that is happening is you’re purchasing large amounts of our great F-18 aircraft from Boeing and it’s one of the great planes, the great fighter jets,” Trump said on Monday at a news conference with his Finnish counterpart in the White House. Niinisto, who was …

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A United Nations human rights panel called on the Russian Federation on Monday to step up prosecutions of racist attacks by ultra-nationalists and neo-Nazis and of hate speech by politicians. Russian authorities must intensify measures to “vigorously combat racist behavior in sports, particularly in football, and ensure that sports regulatory bodies investigate manifestations of racism, xenophobia and intolerance,” the U.N. Committee against Racial Discrimination (CERD) said. Fines or administrative sanctions should be imposed for such cases. The panel, referring to “the upcoming (2018) World Cup, expresses its concern that racist displays remain deeply entrenched among football fans, especially against persons …

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U.S. President Donald Trump, who met with his Finnish counterpart at the White House on Monday, said the United States was “very protective” of the Baltic region, especially in terms of the northern European states’ relations with Russia. “We are very protective of that region,” Trump said at a joint news conference with visiting Finnish President Sauli Niinisto after the two held talks in the Oval Office. “That’s all I can say,” Trump added. “We are very, very protective. We have great friends there, great relationships there.” He added that he thought Russia respected Finland and that he hoped the …

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Poland said on Monday that the legislative process overhauling its judiciary is in line with European standards and called the European Commission’s concerns about rule of law in the country groundless. On July 26, the Commission said it would launch legal action against Poland over the reforms and gave Warsaw a month to respond to concerns that the process undermines the independence of judges and breaks EU rules. Last month, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed into a law a bill giving the justice minister the power to replace heads of ordinary courts, but after mass street protests blocked two other …

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