Category: Євросоюз

A court in Lithuania has found a Russian national guilty of spying and sentenced him to 10 years in prison for attempting to recruit local officials to plant listening devices at the offices of the Baltic nation’s president. The Vilnius district court said Friday that Nikolay Filipchenko was an officer with the Russian Federal Security Service and intended to spy on President Dalia Grybauskaite’s office for Moscow. Filipchenko pleaded not guilty during his trial and has 20 days to appeal the verdict. He was arrested in April 2015 at a Lithuanian-Russian border crossing while carrying a forged passport. In recent …

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German prosecutors said Friday they have arrested a former employee of the Volkswagen unit Audi in connection with the company’s diesel scandal.   The office of the prosecutors of the city of Munich said the man worked in engine development in the southern German city of Neckarsulm and is accused of fraud and unfair advertising.   The prosecutors did not confirm whether the individual was Giovanni Pamio, who was accused Thursday by U.S. authorities of giving the orders to program diesel engines to cheat on emissions tests. Pamio, 60 and an Italian citizen, is a former Audi executive and based …

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London is a hotspot of modern slavery, with workers in hotels, restaurants and on construction sites at particular risk of exploitation, said the head of the Metropolitan police’s anti-slavery unit. Modern slavery cases surged in the first half of this year to about 820 by the end of June, compared to about 1,013 in the whole of 2016, Detective Inspector Phil Brewer told Reuters. The growth in cases is partly due to increased awareness about slavery, and as police and local authorities are now more often considering whether those involved in potential slavery crimes are victims rather than suspects, said …

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The international community is watching in anticipation as Donald Trump, five months into his presidency, holds his first meeting with the man seen as his rival for the title of “most powerful leader” on the planet, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Their formal bilateral discussion late Friday is overshadowing the two-day gathering in Hamburg, Germany, of heads of state of the world’s 20 strongest economies. The meeting is fraught with symbolism as Trump, still new to the world of international diplomacy, sits down with Putin, who came to power in what amounted to a Kremlin palace coup 17 years ago, and …

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U.S. President Donald Trump warns that the values of the West are under attack and questions whether its people have the will to fight for them. During a speech in Poland to mark his second trip to Europe, Trump delivered some of his strongest remarks yet about Russia, warning Moscow that it must stop what he termed its ‘destabilizing’ actions in Ukraine and Syria. Henry Ridgwell reports from Warsaw. …

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European Union officials on Thursday reaffirmed the need to tackle Europe’s migrant crisis in Libya and surrounding countries, amid continued resistance in Europe to welcome refugees. Italy announced some 30 million euro (US$34 million) in new investments aimed at preventing migrants from ever reaching or leaving Libya’s lawless shores where smugglers operate. And EU interior ministers warned they might sanction migrants’ home countries with visa restrictions if they refuse to take their people back when their European asylum bids fail. Europe’s migration crisis was on the agenda at two meetings Thursday: an informal EU-wide interior ministers meeting in Tallinn, Estonia, …

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U.S. President Donald Trump is now in the German port city of Hamburg for the start of the G-20 summit of the world’s leading economies. After a successful visit to Poland, the U.S. leader faces a difficult scenario at the G-20 that includes meetings with leaders of China, Germany, and Russia and a long list of contentious issues.  VOA Europe Correspondent Luis Ramirez reports from Hamburg. …

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U.S. President Donald Trump urged the leaders of central and eastern European nations Thursday to enter into agreements to purchase U.S. energy exports, instead of relying heavily on imports from Russia. “America stands ready to help Poland and other European nations diversify their energy supplies, so that you can never be held hostage to a single supplier,” Trump said in Warsaw, Poland, where he attended a meeting of 12 European nations. Trump did not mention Russia, but many observers believed his remarks were meant to get the leaders to view the U.S. as a viable alternate source of energy. In …

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to Warsaw strengthens Poland’s position in the European Union, Polish President Andrzej Duda said Thursday. Trump and Duda are to speak to reporters Thursday morning after their meeting at the Royal Castle. It also strengthened Poland’s defense. Wednesday night, the U.S. agreed to sell Patriot missile defense systems to Poland in a memorandum, Poland’s Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz said. “A memorandum was signed tonight that the U.S. government has agreed to sell Poland Patriot missiles in the most modern configuration,” Macierewicz said in a news conference broadcast on public television Thursday morning. “I am glad …

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The first meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin Friday will be closely watched but not because of any expectations of progress. While both have expressed a desire to repair relations, expectations of easing what some call a new Cold War are low. As VOA’s Daniel Schearf reports from Washington, the meeting has been clouded by investigations of the Trump campaign’s alleged links to Russia and Russian hacking of the U.S. 2016 election. …

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The Trump administration on Wednesday renewed an offer to cooperate with Russia in the Syrian conflict, including on military matters, ahead of President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin later this week. In a statement, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. is open to establishing no-fly zones in Syria in coordination with Russia as well as jointly setting up a truce monitoring and humanitarian aid delivery mechanism. The statement came as Trump prepared to meet with Putin on Friday in Germany and as the U.S. seeks to consolidate gains made against the Islamic State in recent …

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Britain will lose its status as Europe’s top financial center unless it keeps borders open to specialist staff, improves infrastructure and expands links with emerging economies, TheCityUK said in a report published Thursday. The report from Britain’s most powerful financial lobby group said continental Europe might eventually become the preferred destination for banks, insurers and asset managers as they relocate business there to retain access to the EU single market. Although companies may begin by initially shifting a small number of jobs to Europe, this may accelerate when property leases expire, they carry out business reviews, or the cost of …

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Europe has made a dangerous turn on the Mediterranean Sea as it looks to Libya for help in slowing the number of migrants attempting to reach the continent in flimsy boats, Amnesty International said in a report released Thursday. The organization called the European Union’s strategy of training the Libyan coast guard to rescue migrants “reckless.” By turning to Libya, a country in chaos that is the jumping-off point for the hazardous journey, the EU has created “A Perfect Storm” — the title of Amnesty’s report — that could hammer often-desperate migrants with a double vengeance. They face the risk …

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A French public prosecutor on Wednesday asked a court to sentence the son of Equatorial Guinea’s president to three years in jail on charges of using money plundered from his country to buy Parisian luxury properties and exotic cars. The public prosecutor also said Obiang should pay a 30 million euro fine and have all his assets in France confiscated. Teodorin Obiang, eldest son of President Teodoro Obiang and a vice-president himself, denies charges of laundering embezzled public funds. He is being tried in absentia. The court’s ruling will come at a later date. The case is the first of …

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The Ukrainian software firm at the center of a cyber attack that spread around the world last week said on Wednesday that computers which use its accounting software are compromised by a so-called “backdoor” installed by hackers during the attack. The backdoor has been installed in every computer that wasn’t offline during the cyber attack, said Olesya Bilousova, the chief executive of Intellect Service, which developed M.E.Doc, Ukraine’s most popular accounting software. Last week’s cyber attack spread from Ukraine and knocked out thousands of computers, disrupting shipping and shut down a chocolate factory in Australia as it reached dozens of …

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France’s new president, Emmanuel Macron, sought to reassure opponents of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday after provoking concern among rebel groups by saying that he saw no legitimate successor to Assad. Former president Francois Hollande had backed the Syrian opposition, demanding the six-year conflict be resolved through a political transition that would eventually see Assad replaced. Macron, a centrist elected in May, said last month he no longer considered Assad’s departure a pre-condition for a negotiated settlement to the conflict, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven more than 11 million from their homes. While he …

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel is standing by her suggestion that Europe can no longer entirely rely on the U.S. as she prepares to host President Donald Trump at the Group of 20 summit. Merkel made the comment during a campaign event in late May. Asked in an interview with weekly Die Zeit whether she would repeat it today, she replied: “Yes, exactly that way. It is, for example, open whether we can and should in the future rely on the U.S. investing so much as it has so far in the United Nations’ work, in Middle East policy, in European …

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Belgian prosecutors said four people had been detained after automatic weapons were found in house searches in Brussels as part a counter-terrorism investigation overnight into Wednesday. Police found Kalashnikovs, bullet-proof vests and ammunition in raids on two garages and four homes in the capital’s Anderlecht district, Belgian media outlet RTBF reported. “During one of the house searches, various weapons were found,” federal prosecutors said in a statement. Prosecutors said the overnight detentions were separate from investigations into Islamist attacks in Paris in November 2015, which killed 130 people, and in Brussels four months later in which 32 people were killed. …

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Ukrainian police on Tuesday seized the servers of an accounting software firm suspected of spreading a malware virus which crippled computer systems at major companies around the world last week, a senior police official said. The head of Ukraine’s Cyber Police, Serhiy Demedyuk, told Reuters the servers of M.E.Doc – Ukraine’s most popular accounting software – had been seized as part of an investigation into the attack. Though they are still trying to establish who was behind last week’s attack, Ukrainian intelligence officials and security firms have said some of the initial infections were spread via a malicious update issued …

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Uber suffered a new setback in Europe on Tuesday when a European Union court adviser said France was entitled to charge local managers of the U.S. ride-hailing app firm with running an illegal taxi service. Uber played down the non-binding opinion from an advocate general at the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ), saying it applied only to a service using unlicensed drivers known as UberPOP, which it had already discontinued in France. Judges will make a final ruling later this year. However, they generally follow the advice of their advocates general and the comments come two months …

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