Category: Євросоюз

Swedish authorities have arrested second person in connection with Friday’s truck attack in Stockholm that killed four people and wounded 15 others. There were no immediate details about the additional suspect and how that person is connected to the 39-year-old Uzbek national suspected of ramming a stolen truck into an upscale shopping hub The suspected terrorist was previously known to Swedish intelligence services, but authorities say he was not a part of any ongoing investigations. “Nothing indicates we have the wrong person,” said the head of Sweden’s national police, Dan Eliasson, in comments to reporters Saturday. “On the contrary, suspicions …

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Tens of thousands of Swedes turned out in Stockholm Sunday for what they called a “lovefest” after Friday’s terrorist truck attack killed four people and injured 15. A 39-year-old Uzbek believed to have extremist sympathies is under arrest for allegedly ramming a stolen truck into a crowd at the Ahlens department store. “Fear shall not reign. Terror cannot win,” Mayor Karin Wanngard told a crowd estimated at 50,000. One woman held a poster reading: “We don’t respond with fear, we respond with love.” Friday’s attack apparently had little effect on liberal Sweden’s global reputation as an open and welcoming society. …

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Pope Francis, who is scheduled to visit Egypt later this month, decried Sunday’s blast at a Coptic Church in Egypt’s Nile Delta that killed 21 worshippers and wounded dozens more.   At the end of his Palm Sunday Mass, the leader of the world’s Roman Catholic Church said, ” I pray for the dead and the victims. May the Lord convert the hearts of people who sow terror, violence and death and even the hearts of those who produce and traffic in weapons.” Earlier, in his homily, Francis denounced the suffering in the world today. He said those who ” …

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Norwegian police set off a controlled explosion of a “bomblike device” found in central Oslo Saturday, a suspect is being held in custody, and the security police are investigating, authorities said. A Reuters reporter described a loud bang shortly after the arrival of Oslo’s bomb squad. “The noise from the blast was louder than our explosives themselves would cause,” a police spokesman said, while adding that further investigation would be conducted at the scene. The device had appeared to be capable of causing only a limited amount of damage, the police said earlier. Police declined to give information about the …

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Britain’s foreign minister, Boris Johnson, canceled plans Saturday to visit Moscow, just hours before he was due to depart London, as tensions escalated between the U.S. and Russia over Syria. Russian leaders, who have dubbed as illegal the U.S. action to punish the government of President Bashar al-Assad for its use of chemical weapons, ramped up the war of words late Friday when the country’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, warned America was “one step away from military clashes with Russia.” In an apparent show of force, a Russian frigate armed with cruise missiles, reportedly was heading into the Mediterranean. According …

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Officials say the top US diplomat will urge Russia to rethink its continued support for the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. More from Nike Ching. …

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U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson heads to Moscow on April 12, just days after the United States launched missile strikes on a Syrian airbase in response to a Syrian chemical weapons attack that killed civilians. Officials say the top U.S. diplomat will urge Russia to rethink its continued support for the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.   Britain’s foreign minister, Boris Johnson, said on Saturday he had canceled a visit to Moscow that was scheduled for April 10. “Developments in Syria have changed the situation fundamentally,” said Johnson in a statement.   Secretary of State Tillerson is scheduled to …

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The Basque separatist group ETA has relinquished its last caches of weapons, effectively ending one of the longest conflicts in contemporary European history. The International Verification Commission (IVC) confirmed Saturday that the militant group gave French authorities a list of the locations of 12 weapons caches. “We are disarming one of the longest-surviving armed groups in the world,” Ram Manikkalingam, a mediator with the IVC, told reporters in the southwestern French city of Bayonne. Saturday’s handover was handled through a series of intermediaries and celebrated by hundreds of people with a morning ceremony in Bayonne. The weapons stockpiles could include …

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Before the U.S. attack on a Syrian air base, President Donald Trump accused his predecessor of doing nothing when Syria’s government used chemical weapons against its population in 2013. Trump is right that President Barack Obama issued what amounted to an empty threat of military action. The circumstances, though, were more complicated than Trump described. A look at statements on a selection of subjects over the past week by Trump and lawmakers: TRUMP: In a White House statement after what the Trump administration said was a bombing involving the nerve agent sarin in a rebel-held part of northern Syria: “These …

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Kosovo President Hashim Thaci bowed to pressure from traditional allies the United States and NATO on Friday by putting off plans to establish an army strongly opposed by the country’s minority Serbs. Nearly two decades after the Kosovo war, relations between Serbia and the ethnic Albanian-majority government in Kosovo remain strained. Serbia continues to regard Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008, as a renegade province. Thaci last month found a way to bypass Serb opposition in parliament to constitutional amendments required for an army by drafting changes to an existing law on the Kosovo Security Forces that would allow the …

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Hundreds of thousands of children are paying a heavy price in the three-year conflict between the government of Ukraine and Russian-backed rebels in Donetsk and Luhansk in the eastern part of the country. Although the war has taken thousands of lives and injured many more, the U.N. children’s fund said the conflict has been all but forgotten by the world and become an “invisible crisis” to all except those forced to suffer from ongoing violence, abuse and deprivation.  Among those hardest hit are the more than 200,000 children living along the “contact line,” a 15-kilometer zone that divides government and …

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Russia on Friday condemned the U.S. strike on a government-controlled air base in Syria, saying it would bolster Syria’s air defenses in response. President Vladimir Putin’s office called the action a “significant blow” to the Russia-U.S. relationship. The tension comes just ahead of a visit to Russia by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. VOA’s Daniel Schearf reports from Moscow. …

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The United States and Russia will maintain a hotline aimed at preventing midair collisions of their warplanes in Syria, senior U.S. military officials said Friday, contradicting Moscow’s claims that it has suspended the “deconfliction” talks in protest of America’s cruise missile strikes on a Syrian air base. The officials also said they’re looking into whether Russia participated in the chemical weapons attack in Syria earlier this week that prompted President Donald Trump’s order for a retaliation. They said Russia has failed to control the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons or to account for chemical agents that were supposed to …

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Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg began a trade trip to China on Friday, signaling a restoration of diplomatic ties between the two countries, six years after China cut relations over a Chinese dissident’s selection as Nobel Peace Prize winner. Solberg met with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang during a welcoming ceremony, in which the premier told Solberg the visit “symbolizes the normalization of the China-Norwegian relationship.” China cut off ties with Norway in 2010, after the Nobel committee awarded its peace prize to Liu Xiabao, a Chinese dissident convicted of subversion in 2009 for writing a document calling for democracy in …

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A few days before the July 2014 missile attack on Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, a Ukraine Army-operated Buk missile launcher was located not near fighting in the east, as Moscow has long insisted, but hundreds of kilometers to the west. That’s what a team of journalists and researchers at Bellingcat, a Britain-based investigative website, has concluded after lengthy analysis of digital images taken by a Ukrainian army chaplain. Bellingcat, which specializes in using open-source information such as social media posts to analyze conflicts, was one of the first groups to produce evidence debunking key elements of the Russian government’s claim …

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The European Parliament on Thursday supported easing travel rules for Ukrainians, driving on a Western integration viewed with great suspicion by Moscow. Ukraine has been the scene of the worst confrontation between Russia and the West in Europe since the Cold War with Moscow annexing Crimea from Kyiv in 2014 and backing separatist rebels in the east of the country. The West has sided with Ukraine, where Russia intervened after a Moscow-allied president was toppled by street protests demanding an end to corruption and closer EU ties. Russia denies direct military involvement in its southern neighbor. European lawmakers voted 521 …

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Hungarian charities on Thursday criticized a draft law that would require them to declare foreign funding, saying it would clamp down on freedom of speech and undermine their work with migrants and other vulnerable groups. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party said it would present a bill to parliament this week requiring nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) with a yearly foreign income of 7.2 million forints ($25,000) to register with authorities. The bill said “foreign interest groups” could use their funding of local NGOs to “pursue their own interests” in Hungary, threatening the country’s political and economic interests. “This is …

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European Central Bank head Mario Draghi insisted Thursday that the bank’s massive stimulus efforts are still needed even though the 19-country eurozone’s economy is strengthening. “The recovery is progressing and now may be gaining momentum,” Draghi said in a speech at a conference at Frankfurt’s Goethe University. He cautioned, however, that much of the improvement depended on the ECB’s monetary stimulus efforts and that it was “too soon to declare success.” Draghi’s stance on keeping stimulus in place contrasts with that of the U.S. Federal Reserve, which has already started withdrawing monetary stimulus by raising benchmark interest rates off their …

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Russian police arrested three people Thursday in connection with a suicide bombing in the St. Petersburg subway system earlier this week. Police said the suspects come from the same region of central Asia as the bomber, Akbarzhon Dzhalilov. A bomb also was found and disarmed in the apartment shared by the three suspects on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. The Investigative Committee, Russia’s top criminal investigation agency, said investigators found other evidence in the apartment that will help in the case against the three suspects. Reuters reports the unexploded bomb found in the apartment was similar to the unexploded bomb …

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Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon is threatening to turn France’s presidential election into a four-way race, the latest opinion polls show, confirming a surge of support for him after a strong showing in a TV debate this week. Two polls conducted after a televised debate among candidates Tuesday night showed the 65-year-old Communist-party-backed candidate just a percentage point or two behind third-placed conservative Francois Fillon in an unpredictable contest in which over a third of voters are still undecided. A Harris Interactive poll published Thursday showed centrist Emmanuel Macron holding onto a narrow first round lead over far-right leader Marine Le …

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