Category: Євросоюз

French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe outlined a plan Wednesday to address the high number of migrants arriving in the country, but conceded he has no “magic wand” to resolve a situation that is larger than France and won’t go away any time soon.   The plan calls for speeding up asylum claims, creating more housing for asylum-seekers and other measures to make life easier for people hoping to remain in France. A new law in the making would help enforce expulsions of those deemed to be in the country illegally.   Addressing the carrot and stick approach at a news …

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Donald Trump Jr. has released emails confirming/indicating that he met a Russian attorney last year in the belief that she was a Kremlin agent ready to hand over information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. VOA White House correspondent Peter Heinlein reports the emails have added to the Trump administration’s troubles as it tries to fend off charges of campaign collusion with Russia. …

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Not all the action now underway at Wimbledon is on the tennis court. In back rooms on the tournament site, technology is taking the matches to a whole new level. It offers the most immersive view to tennis fans, whether they are in the stands, or following the play on screens around the world. VOA’s Faiza Elmasry has this report narrated by Faith Lapidus. …

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Russia’s assessment of North Korea’s latest missile launch puzzles many U.S. experts, who say the Kremlin “mischaracterized” the nature of Pyongyang’s test, either as a result of technical flaws or possibly for political reasons. According to Russian state-run media, Moscow’s U.N. mission submitted a letter to the U.N. Secretariat that described the North Korean projectile fired on July 4 as an intermediate-range rocket. That assessment is at odds with U.S., South Korean and Japanese findings that classified the Hwasong-14 as a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). China has not yet commented details of the rocket involved. “A Voronezh-type radar station …

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Fethullah Gulen, the U.S.-based Muslim cleric accused by Turkey of instigating last year’s failed coup, says he has no plans to flee the United States and would accept extradition if Washington agrees to a request by Ankara to hand him over. In an interview in his gated compound in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, Gulen, 79, denied a Turkish government allegation from February that he was preparing to leave for Canada to avoid extradition. “The rumors aren’t true at all,” he told Reuters. “If the United States sees it appropriate to extradite me, I would leave [for Turkey],” he said, sitting in …

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Someone in Romania thought he’d made a fair amount of money when he sold an old typewriter for 100 euros at a flea market. He was wrong. The “typewriter” was in fact a German Wehrmacht Enigma I, a World War II cipher machine, and the collector who bought it put it up for sale at the Bucharest auction house Artmark with a starting price of 9,000 euros ($10,300). On Tuesday, Artmark sold it to an online bidder for 45,000 euros. “The collector bought it from a flea market. He’s a cryptography professor and … he knew very well what he …

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Austria’s foreign minister convened dozens of counterparts on Tuesday to overcome what he calls a “crisis of confidence” hobbling the work of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.   A forum born of Cold War attempts to ease disputes through compromise, the OSCE must reach decisions by consensus. However, regional and international rivalries are preventing agreement on issues ranging from the Ukraine crisis to filling key positions in the organization.   Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz is acting chair of the 57-nation organization tasked with reducing tensions in Europe. The major player at the meeting, however, is not …

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British Prime Minister Theresa May said Tuesday that she has to win a “battle of ideas” in Parliament and the country after losing her majority in last month’s election. In a speech both conciliatory and defiant, May urged her political opponents to contribute their “views and ideas” to help shape government policy. May spoke nearly a year after taking office, and just over a month after she suffered a setback from voters in a June 8 snap election. She acknowledged that the election result was “not what I wanted,” but said she remained committed to building a fairer Britain as …

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Pope Francis has added a fourth pathway to possible sainthood. Until now, gaining consideration for sainthood in the Catholic Church required martyrdom, living a life of heroic values or — less frequently invoked — having a clear saintly reputation. The Vatican announced Tuesday that the pope has issued a new law outlining a new route: people who lived a good Catholic life and who freely accepted a certain and premature death for the good of others. This is the first change to the main sainthood requirements in centuries. Under the new category, a miracle must be attributed to the candidate’s …

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Lithuania’s Defense Ministry says that long-range Patriot missiles are being deployed for the first time in NATO military exercises in the Baltic republics.   The Tobruq Legacy 2017 drill, which began Tuesday, involves troops and air defense systems from five NATO countries, including Britain, the U.S., Latvia, and Poland.   The ministry says the deployment “demonstrates the steadfast U.S. commitment to the security of Lithuania and its high readiness to send strategic capabilities” to the Baltic Sea region.   Lithuania, which borders the Kaliningrad exclave, the home of the Russian Baltic fleet, has deep concerns about Moscow’s military muscle in …

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Russia has indicated a potential new legal salvo in its trade war with Ukraine and the European Union, telling the World Trade Organization that a trade deal between Kiev and Brussels breaks the rules by penalizing Russia. Minutes of a June 29 meeting of the WTO’s committee on regional trade agreements, published on Tuesday, record Russia’s representative as saying the EU-Ukraine free trade agreement was “an exemplary case of a situation where a free trade area worsened trade conditions for other trading partners”. That meant it was a breach of the WTO rules, which say that free trade areas should …

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A British court on Monday gave the parents of 11-month-old Charlie Gard a chance to present fresh evidence that their terminally ill son should receive experimental treatment. The decision came after an emotionally charged hearing in the wrenching case, during which Gard’s mother wept in frustration and his father yelled at a lawyer. Judge Nicholas Francis gave the couple until Wednesday afternoon to present the evidence and set a new hearing for Thursday in a case that has drawn international attention. But the judge insisted there had to be “new and powerful” evidence to reverse earlier rulings that barred Charlie …

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Thousands of unaccompanied and separated refugee and migrant children risk exploitation, trafficking, abuse and violence because European asylum countries have failed to protect them, according to three leading humanitarian organizations. To remedy this situation, the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR), the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and International Rescue Committee (IRC) have devised a “Roadmap for Action” to protect vulnerable children arriving and staying in Europe. ”While the total number of arrivals to Europe has decreased, the situation of unaccompanied and separated children remains an emergency,” said Diane Goodman, deputy director of the UNHCR’s Europe bureau. “It is wrong to assume …

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A call by the Israeli ambassador to Hungary for an end to the billboard campaign against George Soros wasn’t meant to “delegitimize” criticism of the Hungarian-American billionaire, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said Sunday. The ministry’s statement was in response to a Facebook post by Ambassador Yossi Amrani, who said the Hungarian government’s billboards not only evoke “sad memories, but also sow hatred and fear.” The ministry said the “sole purpose” of the ambassador’s statement was to express Israel’s rejections of anti-Semitism and support “Jewish communities everywhere in confronting this hatred.” “In no way was the statement meant to delegitimize criticism …

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The strained U.S. relations with Turkey are beginning to improve, but will require much more work, according to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. “I think we are working very hard to rebuild that level of trust that is the basis for any relationship,” Tillerson said, speaking Monday with the staff and families of the U.S. Mission in Istanbul. “It is important for so many reasons, which is why we must put the relationship on the mend, re-establish it on the proper basis and strengthen it going forward,” he said, citing the war in Syria as one of the issues on …

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The Kremlin said Monday it was unaware of a 2016 meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump’s senior staff and a Russian attorney who promised to give them damaging information about Trump’s challenger, Democrat Hillary Clinton. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it does not know the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and “cannot keep track” of every Russian lawyer and their contacts overseas. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said Sunday that he, Trump’s then-campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met with the Russian lawyer in June 2016 after Trump had clinched the Republican presidential nomination. Veselnitskaya has said …

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U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has marked the anniversary this week of last year’s failed coup coup in Turkey, praising the courage of the Turkish people in defending democracy but failing to mention the widespread government crackdown that has followed since. Speaking Sunday at an oil conference in Istanbul, Tillerson recalled the brief, unsuccessful attempt last July 15 to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He also said the United States sees Turkey as a partner in its push for greater energy security in the region, and “looks forward to engaging with Turkey on projects that will increase global energy …

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Top French company bosses who have for years lamented their country’s slow pace of reforms at an annual summer gathering in Provence offered glowing praise this year for the first steps taken by newly elected President Emmanuel Macron. Sixty days after Macron became France’s youngest ever president, the CEOs gathered in the southern town of Aix-en-Provence said they had sensed a radical change in the country’s image abroad. “The whole world admires France today. There is renewed confidence, optimism about the country,” Patrick Pouyanne, the head of oil major Total, France’s largest company, told reporters. “What I expect from this …

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Tens of thousands of people massed in Istanbul Sunday to protest Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s crackdown on critics of his government in the wake of last year’s failed military coup. The demonstrators chanted “Rights, Law, Justice” in support of the main opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who was completing a 450-kilometer walk from the capital Ankara after a lawmaker from his party was imprisoned in June. It was the biggest protest in several years against Erdogan, whose government has arrested more than 50,000 people and dismissed at least 100,000 civil servants he has characterized as supporters of the aborted coup. …

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U.S. President Donald Trump said Sunday that he twice “strongly pressed” Russian President Vladimir Putin about Russia’s meddling in last year’s U.S. election and it was now time to “move forward in working constructively” with Moscow. In a string of Twitter comments after returning to Washington from the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, Trump noted that Putin vehemently denied any role in interfering in the election and that he and the Russian leader “discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded and safe.” Key Republican lawmakers, however, immediately ridiculed …

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