Category: Євросоюз

Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has told Greek Cypriots to stop dreaming that 35,000 Turkish forces will leave the divided island. “This is their dream. They should wake up from this dream and they should abandon this dream,” he said Thursday at U.N.-sponsored peace talks in Crans-Montana, Switzerland. Cavusoglu said the current round of talks should be the last attempt to resolve the decades-old dispute over Cyprus. “We cannot continue negotiating forever,” the Turkish diplomat said. His Greek counterpart, Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, said the Turkish side has been repeating the same positions over and over. The Greek Cypriots’ demand …

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Australian police charged a top Vatican cardinal Thursday with multiple counts of historical sexual assault offenses, a stunning decision certain to rock the highest levels of the Holy See.   Cardinal George Pell, Pope Francis’ chief financial adviser and Australia’s most senior Catholic, said in an early morning appearance at the Vatican that he would take a leave of absence as the Vatican’s finance czar and would return to Australia to fight the charges. He denied the accusations and denounced what he called a “relentless character assassination” in the media. Victoria state Police Deputy Commissioner Shane Patton said police have …

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Voice of America correspondent Hediye Levent studied the changing conditions Irbil, Iraq. …

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A Ukraine official claimed Wednesday that Russia was behind the previous day’s cyberattack that crippled computers in government ministries and power grid facilities, banks, even at Kyiv’s international airport.  Oleksandr Turchinov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, made the allegation after Tuesday’s cyberattack that ultimately hit companies around the world in an incident that was similar to a ransomware attack last month that targeted hospitals in Britain. The cyberattack, which Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman called “unprecedented,” was caused by a variant of a computer virus known as Petya, which threatens to wipe the infected computer clean of data …

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European security officials are increasingly worried that Islamic State’s reach will not fade even as the terror group loses its grip on Mosul and Raqqa, the twin capitals of its now-collapsing, self-declared caliphate. Instead, they warn of an organization that has carefully reinvented itself in order to take the fight directly to the West, with Europe in the crosshairs. “Despite the recent setback for the Islamic State on the battlefield, the group has reached a new level of capability,” Manuel Navarrette, the head of Europol’s European Counterterrorism Center, warned during a recent visit to Washington. “ISIS has shown the capability …

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Italian officials say their government has told the European Commission in Brussels it is considering stopping ships that are not Italian-registered from disembarking at its ports migrants who were rescued while trying to cross the Mediterranean from Libya. The dramatic move comes after nearly 11,000 asylum-seekers and economic migrants, mainly from African nations, arrived on Italian shores in a four-day period from war-wracked Libya. In a letter to the commission, Italy’s ambassador to the EU, Maurizio Massari, said the situation has become “unsustainable.” In a meeting Wednesday, Massari informed Dimitris Avramopoulos, the EU’s commissioner for migration, that his government is …

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Britain’s Conservative minority government faced its first test in Parliament since the June 8 election on Wednesday — an opposition demand for an end to public spending cuts. The main opposition Labour Party called for a pay raise for public-sector workers, whose salaries have been capped during seven years of austerity, and an end to cuts to police and firefighting budgets. Labour’s proposal came after several days of debate on last week’s Queen’s Speech, which laid out government plans for the next two years. A vote will take place in Parliament at around 7 p.m. (1800 GMT; 2 p.m. EDT). …

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President Donald Trump will attend Bastille Day celebrations in Paris on July 14, according to a statement from the White House. Trump accepted the invitation from French president Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday and “looks forward to reaffirming America’s strong ties of friendship with France.” The two leaders spoke by phone on Tuesday, when Macron offered the invitation. During the call, the White House said “the two leaders also discussed the current situation in the Middle East and reviewed the agenda for the upcoming G-20 Summit” in Hamburg. The two presidents last met in May, when they both traveled to Brussels …

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The United Nations is urging rival Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders to seize this “historic opportunity” to reunify their island, which has been divided since 1974. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was not at the opening session of the resumed Cyprus talks Wednesday, but he sent his personal representative, Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, to deliver a message to the two Cypriot leaders and the guarantor powers in attendance. “This is a historic opportunity to solve a problem that has been there for decades,” Feltman said. “And, what we heard this morning gave us the hope and the conviction that …

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Denmark’s A.P. Moller-Maersk, owner of the world’s largest container shipper Maersk Line, has been hit by the global Petya cyberattack, preventing it from accepting new orders. The cyber extortion campaign, which has disrupted businesses around the world, has also caused congestion at some of the 76 port terminals run by Maersk’s APM Terminals unit, including in the United States, India, Spain and the Netherlands. “Right now, at this hour, we’re not able to take new orders,” Maersk Line Chief Commercial Officer Vincent Clerc told Reuters on Wednesday. “It will have an impact on vessels or cargo that loaded yesterday, today …

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The United States has yet to say whether President Donald Trump will accept an invitation by President Emmanuel Macron to attend France’s annual July 14 Bastille day celebrations, government spokesman Christophe Castaner said on Wednesday. “We confirmed this week the invitation and our services are working on the basis that president trump comes,” Castaner told reporters at a weekly news conference. “It’s neither confirmed today nor rejected.” Macron’s office said on Tuesday it had invited Trump on two occasions to attend the celebrations next month during which the U.S. military will take part to mark 100 years since it joined …

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A new exhibition will examine the overlapping worlds of two figures bound together by history on different sides of the Atlantic — King George III and President George Washington. Britain’s Royal Archives and the U.S. Library of Congress said on Wednesday that a new “Two Georges” exhibit, to be first shown in Washington in 2021, would tap into the libraries’ rich sources of historic knowledge to find parallels and contrasts between the two men. A venue in Britain has yet to be decided. “Linked and then ultimately separated by empire, the two Georges offer a distinctive perspective on this vital …

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U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Tuesday that the United States and the European Union should have a free trade agreement, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for work on such an accord to resume. President Donald Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from an agreement with nations around the Pacific, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but the fate of a proposed trade deal with the EU has been less clear. Merkel vowed recently not to give up on that accord, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Ross told a conference in Berlin attended by Merkel that the U.S. had made a “conscious …

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Albania’s ruling Socialist Party pledged on Tuesday to flush out corrupt judges, create more jobs and tackle the cannabis trade on the path towards European Union membership, after final results confirmed their win in a parliamentary election. Chief election officer Klement Zguri said the final official preliminary tally from Sunday’s vote showed the Socialists won 48 percent, or 74 seats in the 140-seat parliament, and the main opposition Democratic Party 29 percent, or 43 seats. The Democratic Party and a smaller third party, the Socialist Integration Movement (SIM), which won 14 percent, or 19 seats, both accused the Socialists of …

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A wave of cyberattacks that hit Ukraine and Russia spread beyond the borders of those countries, wreaking havoc on government and corporate computer systems in Europe and across the Atlantic. Banks, government offices and airports in Ukraine were among the first to report the cyberattack. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Pavlo Rozenko tweeted a photo of his black computer screen, saying the government’s headquarters had been shut down. Multiple international firms reported being affected Tuesday. They included America’s Merck pharmaceutical company, Russia’s Rosneft oil giant, the Danish shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk, British advertising giant WPP and French industrial group Saint-Gobain. “We …

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It has been a year since Britain voted to leave the European Union by a narrow margin of 52 percent. While the question on the ballot paper may have been simple, the divisions exposed by last year’s referendum cut far deeper. After 12 months of political turmoil, analysts say British society is beginning to resemble that of the United States, with values dictating the divisions in society rather than traditional party politics. Professor Anand Menon, from the UK in a Changing Europe program at Kings College London, points to the death penalty issue as an indicator of a person’s values. …

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U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis travels this week to Brussels, where he will consult with NATO allies on troop contributions and other support in Afghanistan before announcing his own decision on increasing the number of U.S. forces in that war-torn country. But as VOA Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb reports, the new strategy is likely to be more of the same. …

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Prime Minister Theresa May struck a deal on Monday to prop up her minority government by agreeing to at least 1 billion pounds ($1.3 billion) in extra funding for Northern Ireland in return for the support of the province’s biggest Protestant party. After over two weeks of talks and turmoil sparked by May’s failure to win a majority in a June 8 snap election, she now has the parliamentary numbers to pass a budget and a better chance of passing laws to take Britain out of the European Union. May and Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Arlene Foster presided at …

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Thirteen EU nations voiced support on Monday for a proposal to empower the bloc’s executive to negotiate with Russia over objections to a new Russian gas pipeline to Germany, despite opposition from Berlin. At an informal debate among EU energy ministers, Germany’s partners in the 28-nation bloc spoke out against Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline plan to pump more gas directly from Russia’s Baltic coast to Germany. EU nations are expected to vote in the autumn on the European Commission’s request for a mandate to negotiate with Russia on behalf of the bloc as a whole. Germany, the main beneficiary …

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The European Union’s commissioner in charge of enlargement said on Monday the bloc will help Macedonia make key reforms such as ensuring judicial and media independence to unlock the country’s path towards EU and NATO membership. Johannes Hahn arrived in Skopje on Monday to attend a cabinet meeting scheduled to debate a reform agenda. “Tomorrow the first experts from the European Union will be in town to assist you in all these reforms,” Hahn told reporters after he met the cabinet. Last month’s election of Zoran Zaev’s cabinet ended a two-year long political crisis, the biggest since Western diplomacy helped …

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