Category: Євросоюз

An Italian journalist has returned to Italy after being detained for two weeks in Turkey, apparently because he entered an area near the Syrian border without proper permission. Gabriele Del Grande, a blogger and documentary maker who has written about refugees, was detained after entering the area of Hatay in southern Turkey. He arrived Monday at Bologna airport on a flight from Turkey. He said he had been treated well but wanted to know why he was deprived of his freedom for 14 days “for doing his job.”   Italian Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano, flanking Del Grande at the airport, …

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European shares opened sharply higher and the euro briefly vaulted to five-month peaks on Monday after the market’s favored candidate won the first round of the French election, reducing the risk of another Brexit-like shock. The victory for pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron, who is now expected to beat right-wing rival Marine Le Pen in a deciding vote next month, sent the pan-European STOXX 50 index up 3 percent, France’s CAC40 almost 4 percent and bank stocks more than 6 percent. Traders top-sliced some of the euro’s overnight gains, but it was still up more than 1 percent on the dollar, …

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Greece’s coast guard says six bodies have been recovered from the sea off the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos, while one person has been rescued.   The coast guard said a Greek navy vessel located the bodies, believed to be of migrants attempting to enter Greece from Turkey clandestinely, on Monday. Five were recovered by the European border patrol agency Frontex, while one was recovered by the coast guard.   The six dead were one man, four women and a boy. The coast guard rescued a pregnant woman from the water and transported her to Lesbos.   It was unclear …

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A British-Iranian woman detained in Iran while on a trip with her toddler daughter has exhausted all chance of having her five-year prison sentence overturned in court, her family said on Monday. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is one of several dual nationals held in Iran by hard-liners in the country’s judiciary and security services on espionage charges, likely to be used as bargaining chips in future negotiations with the West. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the news agency, found out this weekend her final appeal to Iran’s supreme court had been denied, her husband Richard …

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An American member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was killed and at last two others were injured Sunday when their car hit a mine near rebel-held Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. Austria’s Foreign Ministry confirmed the incident near the small village of Pryshyb.  Austria currently holds the OSCE’s rotating presidency. Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz demanded a thorough investigation, adding that those responsible would be held accountable. Alexander Hug, deputy chief of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM), told journalists that a German and a Czech national were injured but have been treated at a local …

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Polls have closed and vote-counting is under way at more than 500 voting stations in France, following a closely watched presidential election that could decide whether France’s leadership goes to the far right or left. Early estimates placed centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron in the lead, followed by nationalist, anti-immigration candidate Marine Le Pen.  It would be the first time in the history of the modern French Republic the two candidates moving to the second and final round are from non-traditional parties. Eleven candidates were on the ballot as voters turned out in large numbers that, according to French Interior Ministry …

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Britain’s Theresa May appeared on course to win a crushing election victory in June after opinion polls put support for her ruling Conservative party around 50 percent, twice that of the opposition Labor party. May’s decision to call a June 8 election stunned her political rivals this week and a string of polls released late Saturday suggested the gamble had paid off, with one from ComRes showing the party of Margaret Thatcher enjoying levels of support not seen since 1991. May, appointed prime minister in the turmoil that followed Britain’s vote to leave the European Union last June, said she …

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French expatriates in South America, Canada and the United States kicked off the voting Saturday in France’s presidential election, on the heels of several terror attacks that could affect the outcome. Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and a former economy minister, independent centrist Emmanuel Macron, are the top contenders, followed by conservative former Prime Minister Francois Fillon and far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon. The candidates are vying to replace incumbent Francois Hollande, who announced earlier this year that he would not run for another term. Campaigning ended earlier than expected Thursday when a French policeman was killed by a gunman on …

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European scientists are taking part in the March for Science demonstration taking place in hundreds of cities around the world to commemorate Earth Day. Science and research skeptics are becoming more mainstream in an era of populist and Eurosceptic movements. And on both sides of the Atlantic, there is less funding to support independent research. Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a professor at the University of Leuven, says shifting priorities in Europe has had an impact on the work of scientists.   “Now funds for fundamental research are much more difficult to get. Even if the budget remains the same or sometimes …

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Michele Scarponi, the 2011 Giro d’Italia champion, has been killed in a road accident while training close to his home in Filottrano, his Astana team said Saturday. Scarponi, 37, left home early on Saturday morning for a training ride and was hit by a van at a crossroads. “This is a tragedy too big to be written,” Astana said in a statement. “We left a great champion and a special guy, always smiling in every situation, he was … a landmark for everyone in the Astana Pro Team.” Scarponi, who completed the Tour of the Alps on Friday, after winning …

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The co-founder of Microsoft, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, has given a passionate defense of foreign aid and voiced fears that the political climate in the US and Britain could see aid budgets cut. In a speech in London this week, he warned that withdrawing aid would create a ‘leadership vacuum that others will fill.’ Henry Ridgwell reports. …

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The son of a Russian lawmaker was sentenced Friday by a U.S. federal court to 27 years in prison after being convicted of a cyber assault on thousands of U.S. businesses, marking the longest hacking-related sentence in the United States. Roman Seleznev, 32, was found guilty last year by a jury in Seattle of perpetrating a scheme that prosecutors said involved hacking into point-of-sale computers to steal credit card numbers and caused $169 million in losses to U.S. firms. The Russian government has maintained that his arrest in 2014 in the Maldives was illegal. It issued a statement Friday criticizing …

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Greece far exceeded its international lenders’ budget demands last year, official data showed on Friday, posting its first overall budget surplus in 21 years even when debt repayments are included. The primary surplus — the leftover before debt repayments that is the focus of International Monetary Fund-European Union creditors — was more than eight times what they had targeted. Data released by Greek statistics service ELSTAT — to be confirmed on Monday by the EU — showed the primary budget surplus at 3.9 percent of gross domestic product last year versus a downwardly revised 2.3 percent deficit in 2015. This …

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Challenges are growing to the validity of Sunday’s referendum in Turkey to extend the country’s presidential powers. “Referendum won by cheating,” declared Osman Baydemir, spokesman of the pro-Kurdish HDP, Turkey’s second-largest opposition party. An HDP report on the vote said 2,462 “No” campaigners were detained and 453 jailed during the 85-day campaign. HDP’s honorary president and deputy, Ertugrul Kurkcu, said the past two months were a “total violation of democratic principles.” Kurkcu said the investigation revealed widespread abuse on voting day. “It’s obvious,” he said. “Fraud is extensive. Invalid ballots and envelopes were very widely deliberately used, as well as …

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Russia’s Federal Security Service said on Friday that a gunman had burst into one of its regional offices in the far east of the country and opened fire, killing one of its employees and a visitor. The region where the incident happened is close to China. The FSB, the successor organization to the Soviet KGB, said the attacker had been killed and that another person had been injured in the incident. “An unknown person entered the reception of the FSB’s Khabarovsk regional branch and started shooting at people inside,” the FSB said in a statement. The Site Intelligence Group, a …

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Senior French officials say Thursday’s shooting in Paris and a planned attack foiled by police in Marseilles earlier this week are part of an effort by radical Islamists to influence the result of France’s upcoming election. They fear more terrorism is being planned — including possibly an attack on polling day. “They want to influence French political life by directly impacting the course or even the organization of the polls,” Thibault de Montbrial, former head of the French foreign ministry’s internal think tank, the Center for Analysis and Prevision, told French newspaper Le Figaro. French authorities say the gunman, named …

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German police arrested a man Friday who is suspected of planting explosives targeting the bus of soccer team Borussia Dortmund last week, the office of the German federal chief prosecutor said. The 28-year old man, a dual German and Russian national identified as Sergei V., had bought options on Borussia Dortmund’s stock before the attack, hoping to make a profit, it said in a statement. The players’ bus was heading to their stadium for a Champions League match against AS Monaco April 11 when three explosions occurred, wounding Spanish defender Marc Bartra and delaying the match by a day. The …

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Holocaust denial just got a little harder. The Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust & Genocide is making the United Nations’ files on World War II war crimes more accessible by allowing the general public to search an online catalog of the documents for the first time beginning Friday. People will still have to visit the library in London or the U.S. Holocaust Museum to read the actual files. The move is expected to increase interest in the archives of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, including the names of about 37,000 people identified as war criminals and security …

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Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, the world’s oldest and longest-reigning monarch, celebrated her 91st birthday in a usual low-key fashion Friday. Artillery gun salutes in London’s Hyde Park and at the Tower of London will mark the occasion although the queen, who normally spends her birthday privately, has no formal engagements planned. Elizabeth was born April 21, 1926, in Bruton Street in central London when Calvin Coolidge was U.S. President and Joseph Stalin had just taken control in the Soviet Union. She became queen in 1952 at 25. Despite her age, she regularly carries out official duties although she has cut back …

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A Belgium man wanted in connection  with the terrorist attack on Paris’ Champs Elysees has turned himself in to authorities in Antwerp. A Belgium prosecutor said Friday the “man came to police late yesterday after he saw himself appear on social media as terror suspect Number One . . .”  Further information about the suspect and his connection with the attack was not immediately available. Islamic State, which claimed responsibility through its news agency, identified the shooter as “Abu Yussef the Belgian,” calling him “one of Islamic State’s fighters.” Paris police said the dead gunman has been identified, but they …

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