Category: Євросоюз

Migration is the “Trojan wooden horse” of terrorism and the current lull in the migrant flow is only temporary, Hungary’s prime minister said Tuesday. Prime Minister Viktor Orban, an early supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump, has ordered the reinforcement of fences on Hungary’s southern borders to keep out migrants. Orban says the migrants, many of whom are Muslims, are a threat to Europe’s Christian identity and culture.   Orban said the migration issue would remain as long as its causes in the countries of origin were not dealt with and its potential risks were not recognized. “Migration is the …

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A Kyiv court set bail Monday for the former head of Ukraine’s tax service who had recently been named a suspect in a major corruption case involving the embezzlement of approximately $74 million. The case against Roman Nasirov is seen by some as the first real test of the country’s new National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU).Nasirov’s bail has been set at $3.7 million.If he doessn’t pay he’ll be held in pre-trial detention for two months.  “The case is unique as it is first time since independence of Ukraine when such a high official in office is being charged for corruption,” said …

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French authorities say there are no fatalities in an avalanche in the Tignes ski resort in the Alps, and a large search and rescue operation is over.    An official with the regional administration, or prefecture, says that the operation has been called off.    The avalanche struck at 9:50 a.m. (0850 GMT; 3:50 a.m. EST) Tuesday on the La Carline ski slope, prompting the resort to shut down. French media earlier reported that several skiers were caught in the sudden snowfall.   Four snowboarders died last month in Tignes in another avalanche near the resort. …

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Last week, just days after the southern Caucasus nation of Georgia celebrated its newly awarded visa-free travel access to 30 EU countries, Russian news outlets began reporting a different story. Georgia’s visa liberalization wasn’t the result of Tblisi’s successful, long-planned reforms targeting European integration, Russian outlets said, but part of a seedy quid pro quo that would require the former Soviet republic to build camps for displaced Syrian refugees on its own soil. The Russian news outlets, along with their pro-Russian counterparts in Georgia, based their claims on one source: German newspaper Bild’s interview with Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz, …

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The trauma of a perilous boat journey to Greece still fresh in her mind, Tolay performed a ritual she’d felt too unsafe to undertake for the previous three months. “When I put on my makeup, I was crying,” Tolay, said a transgender woman from Iraq in one of her first acts on European soil to reclaim her identity. “It was like I was dreaming.” For the 26-year-old, as for many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex refugees and migrants who have found themselves in Greece, the promise of Europe is not just of safety, but acceptance, amid the challenges …

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European leaders are pursuing a new tack in their bid to dissuade the Trump administration from pulling out of the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change. Withdraw and miss out on economic and commercial opportunities in clean growth, the Europeans are warning Washington policy makers. In back channel discussions, the Europeans are emphasizing a lower carbon future is now inevitable and a United States that’s not fully on board will lose out in terms of energy innovation and clean energy job creation. Others are dangling the prospects to American energy innovators and climate researchers of tax advantages and government subsidies, …

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A United Nations court has referred Turkey to the Security Council for failing to release a judge imprisoned for suspected involvement in last year’s failed coup. The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT) had given Turkey until February 14 to release Aydin Sefa Akay, a Turkish national who was due to hear a request for the case of a Rwandan genocide convict to be reopened. “The government of Turkey has failed to comply with its obligations,” Judge Theodor Meron said in a written ruling Monday. “This matter shall be reported to the United Nations Security Council.” Akay was one of …

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The Netherlands faces political disarray after the March 15 election as mainstream parties, diminished by losses of voters to nationalist leader Geert Wilders but refusing to work with him, struggle to forge a viable coalition. Wilders, the anti-Islam, anti-EU firebrand running almost neck-and-neck with conservative Prime Minister Mark Rutte, stands to double his seat total in parliament while the two coalition parties’ share is cut almost in half. The political landscape is fragmenting after decades of stable consensus. Seven major parties will jostle for power and toil to find common ground on hot-button issues such as Muslim immigration, national identity …

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Ukraine asked the United Nations’ highest court on Monday to order Russia to stop funding and equipping pro-Russian separatists, at the start of a hearing where it hopes to prove Moscow is breaking international law. Russia denies sending troops or military equipment to eastern Ukraine and is expected to challenge the basis of the case Ukraine has launched at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. “Today I stand before the World Court to request protection of the basic human rights of Ukrainian people,” Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Olena Zerkal said on the first of four days of hearings. …

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The euro fell on Monday after former French prime minister Alain Juppe ruled out standing in the country’s presidential elections, which investors saw as increasing the likelihood of a victory by anti-EU leader Marine Le Pen. A poll on Friday had suggested that if Juppe replaced the scandal-hit Francois Fillon as the centre-right candidate, he would win the election’s first round, with centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron coming second — a scenario that would knock Le Pen out of the race. But with Fillon in contention, polls suggest Le Pen would come either first or second in the first round and would …

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If there are hooligans planning to crash the 2018 World Cup football (soccer) finals in Russia, a Russian lawmaker thinks he has a solution. Parliament member Igor Lebedev has even drawn up rules for what he calls “draka” – the Russian word for “fight.” There would be 20 unarmed fighters on each side taking on one another in a stadium at a scheduled hour. He said these fights between different fan groups could attract thousands of spectators. “If visiting fans, for example, begin picking fights they receive an answer — your challenge is accepted. Let’s meet at the stadium at …

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Four top European leaders hold talks Monday on the future of the European Union, at a time when it faces multiple crises that are sparking doubts about its very existence.  Hosted by French President Francois Hollande at the iconic Versailles palace outside Paris, the dinner meeting that brings together German, Italian and Spanish leaders comes amid heated discussion about how to move forward the deeply troubled European Union in the face of Brexit, rising nationalism and an EU-skeptic Trump administration in Washington.  Those issues will be hashed out during a broader EU summit March 25, coinciding with the 60th anniversary …

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British Islamist terrorists are getting younger and an increasing number had no prior convictions or previous criminal records before carrying out an act of terrorism or being arrested in the later stages of planning attacks, according to a major report to be published this week in London. The rising proportion of militants who are so-called “clean skins,” previously unknown to the authorities, has jumped sharply, posing a growing challenge for Britain’s security services as they scramble to try to prevent acts of terrorism, says the report’s author, Hannah Stuart, an analyst at The Henry Jackson Society, a British research group. …

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Russian news reports say curious and pious people are visiting a bust of the last czar in the Crimean capital after reports spread that the sculpture appeared to be weeping.   The bust of Nicholas II was erected near the Crimean prosecutor’s office in Simferopol in 2016, two years after Russia annexed the peninsula from Ukraine.   Nicholas II, like previous czars, is considered a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church.   Reports of statues and other inanimate objects appearing to weep periodically surface in various religions.   Natalia Poklonskaya, the former Crimean prosecutor, called the appearance of moisture “a …

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Embattled French presidential candidate Francois Fillon delivered a defiant speech to thousands of supporters in central Paris on Sunday, but made no pledge to fight on as pressure from his conservative party mounted on him to step aside. Once the frontrunner in the presidential race, Fillon is mired in a scandal over his wife’s pay, and his campaign has been in serious trouble since he learned last week that he could be placed under formal investigation for misuse of public funds. Party leaders prepared for a meeting on Monday to discuss crisis ahead of a March 17 deadline when all …

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Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist party, has fallen just short of becoming the largest party in elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly.   In results declared early Friday, the Democratic Unionist Party led with 28 seats, just one more than Sinn Fein’s total.   At stake in the outcome from Thursday’s snap election is the revival or demise of power-sharing between Irish Catholics and British Protestants, the central objective of the U.S.-brokered Good Friday peace accord nearly two decades ago. Seeking to be No. 1   Sinn Fein was seeking to overtake the Protestants of the Democratic Unionists and become …

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Cardinal Joseph Zen, the most senior Roman Catholic figure in China, says he is deeply skeptical about a reputedly imminent agreement between Chinese leaders in Beijing and Pope Francis in the Vatican. Zen, the former bishop of Hong Kong, told VOA he is most concerned about the possibility that a rapprochement between China and the Vatican will give China’s government a role in the nomination of Catholic bishops there. A deal between the church and the communist government would be seen by many as a diplomatic coup for Pope Francis, after more than six decades of difficult relations with China. …

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Georgia, responding to an intervention from a European court, on Friday suspended a ruling from a domestic court that had placed the country’s biggest independent TV station under the control of a close ally of the government. The country’s supreme court on Thursday ordered broadcaster Rustavi 2 returned to its former co-owner, businessman Kibar Khalvashi, in a move critics at home and abroad called an attempt to muzzle the media. Rustavi 2’s attorneys challenged the ruling at the European Court of Human Rights, which on Friday ordered its temporary suspension. “We will follow this procedure,” Justice Minister Tea Tsulukiani told …

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Nationalist Serbian lawmakers booed the European Union’s top diplomat Federica Mogherini on Friday as she addressed their parliament during tour aimed at addressing concerns about rising tensions in the Balkans. Mogherini’s trip to all six Western Balkans states, still scarred by wars fought in 1990s along political, ethnic and religious lines, is meant to lay the groundwork for an EU foreign ministers meeting on Monday and a summit on Thursday. Several EU leaders have expressed alarm at a variety of problems there and some blame Russia for seeking to destabilize the region, EU officials say. At Mogherini’s speech to the …

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Irish government investigators said Friday that up to 800 remains of babies have been discovered in a mass grave at a former Catholic home for unmarried mothers. The discovery confirmed a local historian’s claim that the children may be in an unmarked grave at the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in the western Irish town of Tuam. Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes Commission said excavations revealed an underground structure that contained “significant quantities of human remains.” The commission said DNA analysis confirmed the ages of the children ranged from 35 weeks to three years. Records show the babies …

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