Bloc
Lithuania begins building barrier on border with Belarus to block migrants
Lithuania began building a barrier along its border with Belarus on Friday after accusing Belarusian authorities of flying in migrants from abroad to send illegally into the European Union. The first stretch of barrier will run 500 metres (1,640 feet) in length, measure 1.8 metres (six feet) in height and consist of concertina and razor wire, the army defence chief’s spokeswoman Ruta Montvile told Reuters. Belarus in May decided to allow migrants to enter EU member Lithuania in retaliation for sanctions imposed by the bloc after Minsk forced a Ryanair flight to land on its soil and arrested a dissident blogger who was on board. “If someone thinks we will close our border with Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine and will become a holding site for those running from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq...
French, German leaders urge EU coordination on reopening borders
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron called on Friday for European Union countries to coordinate their COVID-19 border reopening policies and guard against new variants of the virus. Macron said EU countries must be careful not to allow new variants to spread, adding that the EU was watching developments in Britain, which has seen a steep rise in the weekly reported cases of the Delta variant. “Some countries have reopened their borders earlier for tourist industry reasons, but we must be careful not to re-import new variants,” he told a joint news conference with Merkel before a working dinner at the chancellery in Berlin. Merkel added: “We can’t act as if the coronavirus is over.” “Caution is still necessary so that we have a summer of many freedoms, if no...
Morocco says Madrid seeks to ‘Europeanise’ its crisis with Rabat
Morocco’s foreign minister on Wednesday accused Spain of trying to turn a political crisis between the two countries into an EU problem by focusing on migration and ignoring the root causes. The row blew up in April after Spain admitted the leader of the Western Sahara independence movement, Brahim Ghali, for medical treatment without informing Rabat, which regards the disputed territory as its own. Morocco then appeared to relax border controls with Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta on May 17, leading to an influx of at least 8,000 migrants. Since then Spain and Morocco have traded accusations of violating good neighbourliness, with Spain saying Morocco used the migrants while Rabat says Spain acted in connivance with “adversaries” of its territorial integrity. “Spain tries to Europe...
Bulgaria to set up its own ‘blacklist’ after U.S. graft sanctions
Bulgaria will set up its own “blacklist” of companies and people associated with three Bulgarians and 64 entities that the United States has imposed sanctions on over alleged corruption, preventing state dealings with them, the interim government said late on Friday. The United States this week blocked assets and cut off access to its financial system to former lawmaker and media mogul Delyan Peevski, government official Ilko Zhelyazkov and fugitive gambling tycoon Vassil Bozhkov. The interim government, in office until a July 11 parliamentary election, is setting up a group of financial and interior ministry officials as well as tax and intelligence officers to identify and list people and entities associated with those under U.S. sanctions. State administrations and companies with state ...
Fury over Belarus airliner ‘hijack’ set to dominate EU summit
Fury over the forced landing of a Ryanair plane in Belarus has upended the agenda of a European Union summit dinner on Monday, where leaders were due to discuss relations with Russia and Britain but will now also consider punitive steps against Minsk. Belarusian authorities scrambled a fighter jet and flagged what turned out to be a false bomb alert to force the civilian aircraft to land on Sunday and then detained an opposition-minded journalist who was among the passengers on board. The diversion of a plane owned by an EU company that was flying between two EU capitals was “an inadmissible step”, the bloc’s foreign policy chief said, and it would be raised at the summit. “The EU will consider the consequences of this action, including taking measures against those responsible,” Josep Bor...
Rebels attack Myanmar army near border, junta knocks back ASEAN plan
Ethnic minority Karen insurgents attacked a Myanmar army outpost near the Thai border on Tuesday in some of the most intense clashes since a military coup nearly three months ago threw the country into crisis. The Karen National Union (KNU), Myanmar’s oldest rebel force, said it had captured the army camp on the west bank of the Salween river, which forms the border with Thailand. The Myanmar military later hit back against the insurgents with air strikes, an aid worker in the area said. The fighting took place as the junta, in a setback for diplomatic efforts by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), said it would “positively” consider the bloc’s suggestions to end the turmoil in Mynamar but only when stability was restored. The ASEAN leaders said after meeting at the weekend...
EU defends vaccine distribution as nations complain it is uneven
The European Commission on Saturday defended its policy of distributing COVID-19 vaccines evenly in the bloc after Austria and five other member states complained that doses were not allocated equally. In a joint letter to the Commission and the European Council, leaders of six European countries, including Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Latvia, and later Croatia, called for discussions on vaccine distribution. The Commission responded that doses have been distributed in proportion with the population of each country and taking into account epidemiological data, adding that was up to member state governments to decide how to share them. A flexible policy agreed by EU governments meant countries facing a more acute phase of the epidemic could access more doses, if some governments opte...
Nigeria expects 41 million coronavirus vaccine doses from African Union
Nigeria expects to receive 41 million Covid-19 vaccine doses from the African Union, the head of the country’s primary healthcare agency said on Monday, while the health minister said vaccines from Russia and India were being considered. Authorities in Africa’s most populous country, which has 200 million people, plan to inoculate 40% of the population this year and another 30% in 2022. The African Union initially secured 270 million Covid-19 vaccine doses from manufacturers for member states. Last week it was announced that the bloc would receive another 400 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Faisal Shuaib, who heads the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, said Nigeria’s previous request for 10 million doses through the AU had been increased four-fold. “We have applied...
Scottish leader promises to hold ‘legal’ independence vote
Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said she will push ahead with plans to hold a “legal” referendum on independence from Britain if her party secures a majority in polls later this year, despite London’s opposition. The post Scottish leader promises to hold ‘legal’ independence vote appeared first on TODAY. You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back power. Get to meet Beautiful people, chat and make money in the process. Earn rewards by chatting, sharing photos, blogging and help give users back their fair share of Internet revenue.
Germany starts coronavirus vaccines a day early
A 101-year-old woman in an elderly care home became the first person in Germany to be inoculated against coronavirus on Saturday, a day before the official vaccination campaign was scheduled to get under way in both Germany and the EU. Edith Kwoizalla was one of around 40 residents and 10 staff in a care home in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt to receive a jab of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the home’s manager Tobias Krueger told AFP. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine became the first to get the go-ahead for use in the West, when Britain gave its approval on December 2. As other nations from the United States to Saudi Arabia to Singapore followed suit, Germany impatiently prodded the EU’s drugs regulator, the European Medicines Agency, to bring forward its decision from December 29. The EMA f...
EU criticises ‘hasty’ UK approval of coronavirus vaccine
The European Union criticised Britain’s rapid approval of Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday, saying its own procedure was more thorough, after Britain became the first western country to endorse a COVID-19 shot. The move to grant emergency authorisation to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has been seen by many as a political coup for UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has led his country out of the EU and faced criticism for his handling of the pandemic. The decision was made under an ultra-fast, emergency approval process, which allowed the British drugs regulator to temporarily authorise the vaccine only ten days after it began examining data from large-scale trials. In an unusually blunt statement, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), which is in charge of approving COVID...
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German foreign minister: EU veto ‘hostage’-taking on foreign policy must end
Germany’s foreign minister said on Monday the European Union should abolish the right of individual member states to veto foreign policy measures as the 27-nation bloc could not allow itself to be “held hostage”. His comments, which came days after a more junior official criticised Hungary by name, reflect growing frustration in Berlin at the way in which EU member countries can prevent the bloc from acting in matters on which almost all members agree. “We can’t let ourselves be held hostage by the people who hobble European foreign policy with their vetoes,” Heiko Maas told a conference of Germany’s ambassadors in Berlin. “If you do that then sooner or later you are risking the cohesion of Europe. The veto has to go, even if that means we can be outvoted.” His remarks amount to a highly u...