Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Climate lobbying watchdog claims US oil giant met EC officials in run-up to policy
The US oil firm ExxonMobil met key European commission officials in an attempt to water down the European Green Deal in the weeks before it was agreed, according to a climate lobbying watchdog.
Documents unearthed by InfluenceMap revealed that Exxon lobbyists met Brussels officials in November to urge the EU to extend its carbon-pricing scheme to “stationary” sources, such as power plants, to include tailpipe emissions from vehicles using petrol or diesel.
The EU is mired in a crisis of legitimacy – but municipal movements are rebuilding democracy from below
Conservative politicians have long declared there is no alternative to capitalism. Many of capitalism’s cruelties, from housing crises and crumbling public amenities to increasingly precarious forms of employment, are most visible in towns and cities. But it’s also in these places that new movements are emerging and rebuilding politics from the bottom up. In cities such as Barcelona, Amsterdam, Berlin and Naples, local activists are defending human rights and public services against a rising tide of anti-immigrant xenophobia and fiscal austerity. We call these urban movements “municipalism”.
By achieving small victories around the world, municipalist movements are proving that there is another way of doing politics – one that begins in the places closest to us. It’s thanks to this movement that someone such as me, a woman from a working-class family who began my political career as a housing activist, can today govern a city such as Barcelona. A tide of municipal movements connects cities across the world, creating networks of alliances and shared objectives. Together, we have put pressure on our national governments and demanded greater powers to fight gentrification, increase the stock of affordable housing, and safeguard our collective right to the city.
Lack of information has left thousands of expats confused about status, study shows
Britons living in Spain are confused and fearful about their post-Brexit futures “to a quite shocking extent”, according to the author of a study, with poor support and communication from British and Spanish authorities mainly to blame.
Despite the withdrawal agreement securing the basic rights of UK citizens legally resident on the continent, Karen O’Reilly, a sociology professor at Loughborough University, said her research revealed “enormous levels of uncertainty and worry”.
EU negotiator sets out main obstacles to deal, including rights convention and fishing
Michel Barnier has spoken of grave differences between the EU and the UK over their future relationship, warning that Boris Johnson’s refusal to formally commit to the European convention on human rights would limit cooperation in fighting crime.
Following the first round of negotiations between the two 100-strong teams, the EU’s chief negotiator said there were many “serious divergences” between the two sides.
Hundreds of refugees and migrants were queuing and camping near the Turkish-Greek border on Thursday. This footage was shot from a Turkish government helicopter while the interior minister, Süleyman Soylu, was inspecting the region. Last week Turkey announced it would no longer abide by a 2016 deal with the EU to reduce illegal migration
Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen, including the Commons health committee questioning Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer
Boris Johnson and Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England and the UK government’s chief medical adviser have both been speaking about coronavirus this morning. Whitty gave evidence to the Commons health committee for about an hour and a half, and Johnson gave a much shorter interview to ITV’s This Morning. They did not contract each other in any way, but there was a marked difference in tone. Whitty was calm and factual, in no way alarmist, but also very honest about the fact that coronavirus is likely to lead to a significant disruption to normal life, and particularly to the NHS, for a short period later this year. In contrast, Johnson was much keener to gloss over the downsides and assure viewers that the UK was going to get through this “in good shape”.
Perhaps this is a sophisticated “good cop, bad cop” routine. But it is more likely that Johnson is just congenitally programmed for optimism, and resistant to anything that might make him sound like a “gloomster”. People expect their leaders to be positive, and at the moment Johnson is getting mostly plaudits for his handling of this crisis, but there may come a point where he does not seem to be acknowledging the risk.
The most important message at this stage, as we start to see the spread, is number one, wash your hands, but number two, as far as possible, it should be business as usual for the overwhelming majority of people in this country, for the simple reason this is a great country, massively strong economy, the British public I think understands completely the balance of risk involved. The scientists have done a very good job of explaining to us what the risks are, and they are really quite small. They are appreciable, but quite small. And people can see that this country is going to get through this in good shape.
One of the theories is perhaps you could take it in on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease to move through the population without really taking as many draconian measures. I think we need to strike a balance.
I think it would be better if we take all the measures that we can now just to stop the peak of the disease being as difficult for the NHS as it might. I think there are things we may be able to do.
At the moment what they are telling me is, actually, slightly counter-intuitively, things like closing schools and stopping big gatherings don’t work as well perhaps as people think in stopping the spread.
Let me clear that up immediately because it is very important that we are transparent, people understand that we are transparent.
Public Health England needs to be absolutely sure about the diagnosis of these cases so what they are doing is they are immediately identifying the region where they think there’s an incidence and then within 24 hours confirming the exact location to be sure that we have got the right thing.
The bit of the system which will come under pressure first will be those conditions that require people to have oxygen and particularly to have critical care beds, and that bit, I think, will come under pressure at quite an early stage if we have a high-end-of-the-range epidemic for this.
Q: Will coronavirus affect the talks?
Barnier says there are a lot of people at these meetings. At most there are 200 people at a meeting. But the EU will be taking steps to protect people.
European-listed firms could face fines if fewer than 40% of their non-executive board seats are taken by women
The European Union executive is reviving plans for mandatory quotas of women on company boards, amid slowing progress towards gender equality among top management.
The EU commissioner for equality, Helena Dalli, told journalists that quotas “can be a very ugly word” but were also “a necessary evil, in the sense we have to use quotas because otherwise we will wait another 100 years for things to change by themselves”.
Climate crisis likely to have supercharged temperatures around world, data suggests
The winter just experienced by Europe was by far the hottest on record, scientists have announced, with the climate crisis likely to have supercharged the heat.
The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) data dates back to 1855. It said the average temperature for December, January and February was 1.4C above the previous winter record, which was set in 2015-16. New regional climate records are usually passed by only a fraction of a degree. Europe’s winter was 3.4C hotter than the average from 1981-2010.
Turkey was once on course to join the EU. The desperate refugees trapped on its border reflect a broken relationship
To understand Europe, we need to look more carefully at its borders. Too often, the debates on the future of Europe focus on a few leading nations and overlook the periphery. Yet the fate of the continent is deeply and inevitably connected with what’s happening along its fringes. And there is no bordering country that has as complex and confusing a relationship with Europe as Turkey – it was, after all, the Ottoman empire that was first referred to as “the sick man of Europe”.
Buoyed by fire sales of public assets, a tiny minority of Greeks are thriving. Everyone else is mired in hopelessness
Spring is already in the air across Greece. Even in the bleakest of times, nature’s renaissance renders hope irrepressible. But this one is proving a cruel spring for a people caught up in a decade-old crisis yielding one ritual humiliation after another.
Costas runs a small bookshop in my central Athens neighbourhood. Although jovial by constitution, he finds it difficult to hide the worry lines multiplying on his face. Fifteen years ago he put his flat up as collateral for a business loan to spruce up the bookshop. When the Greek debt crisis wreaked its havoc, it was impossible to service that loan.
Bloc leaders announce financial support as UN questions Athens’ suspension of asylum applications
European Union leaders have given a show of support for Athens, describing Greece as Europe’s “shield” in deterring migrants, despite questions from the UN about breaches of international refugee law.
Four EU leaders met the Greek prime minister, Kyriákos Mitsotákis, at the border town of Orestiada on Tuesday, near where Greek police have been using teargas to deter hundreds of migrants from attempting to cross from Turkey.
Dozen member states hope letter will focus minds before Glasgow UN talks this year
A dozen countries have called for an EU climate target for 2030 to be drawn up “as soon as possible”, if the bloc is to galvanise the rest of the world before vital UN talks in Glasgow later this year.
In a letter to the EU’s top official on climate action, Frans Timmermans, the dozen EU member states say “the EU can lead by example and contribute to creating the international momentum needed for all parties to scale up their ambition” by adopting a 2030 EU greenhouse gas emissions reduction target “as soon as possible and by June 2020 at the latest”.
From Hungary to the UK, mainstream conservatives have capitulated to the authoritarianism of the far right
If there is one thing on which Brussels insiders and Eurosceptics can agree, it’s that the EU has experienced a decade of crises. The eurozone crisis and the subsequent enforcement of fiscal austerity exposed the coercive underside of Brussels. The arrival of refugees in 2015 tested the limits of European liberalism. Brexit, the first time a member state has handed back its EU membership, wounded the self-image of the EU as an ever-expanding bloc. But as serious as these challenges are, none of them threatens to shake European integration like the entrenchment of the far right in two member-state governments.
Europe’s real tumult lies in the failure of its centre-right parties to avert the rise of the far right. In Hungary, the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who is about to celebrate his 10th year in office, has developed a rule book for how to stealthily undermine democratic institutions and the rule of law while still appearing to follow legal procedures. For the last decade, his Fidesz party has had a large enough majority in parliament to change the constitution according to its autocratic whims. It has transformed the electoral system such that a real turnover in power is now virtually impossible. Last year, the widely respected democracy watchdog Freedom House downgraded Hungary’s status to a “partly free” country – the first time this has happened from within the EU.
Research reveals one in three voters now back parties that are critical of or hostile to the bloc
The paradox at the heart of Europe is revealed today in new research that shows that the vote share for Eurosceptic parties has more than doubled in two decades, even though support for the EU remains at record highs.
The sharp increase in the electoral success of Eurosceptic parties is laid bare in research conducted by academic experts in populism and radicalism across the EU who shared their work with the Guardian.
Distracted leaders have been unable to agree on how to ease the burden on frontline states
It was said to be the moment when the European Union lost its political innocence. Nearly four years ago, in March 2016, EU leaders signed a deal with Turkey aimed at preventing asylum seekers from travelling to Europe.
The pact was “celebrated by people who are dancing on the grave of refugee protection”, said the Europe boss of Amnesty International. But the realpolitik worked: the number of people arriving on the Greek islands from Turkey dropped drastically from a peak of 7,000 a day to a few hundred, although numbers began creeping up again in 2019.
Four-year-old dies as crisis sparked by Turkey’s decision to open its borders continues
The first victim of the worsening crisis that has engulfed Greece following Turkey’s abrupt decision to open its borders to thousands of refugees desperate to reach Europe has been confirmed with the death of a child in waters off Lesbos.
Authorities said a four-year-old Syria boy died early on Monday when an inflatable dinghy carrying people from the Turkish coast capsized off the island. “Doctors rushed to save the child but it was too late,” a police source on Lesbos said.
The British economy would be at most 0.16% larger by the middle of the next decade under a comprehensive trade deal with the US, the government has admitted, laying bare the limited benefits from striking an agreement with Donald Trump.
In a document published by Liz Truss’s Department for International Trade designed to kick-start post-Brexit trade talks with the Trump White House, the government said the British economy stood to benefit from an “ambitious and comprehensive” trade deal worth a fraction of GDP, equivalent to £3.4bn after 15 years.
The key to European power projection isn’t institutional reform, it’s a shift in attitude and a willingness to cooperate
As a European leader once remarked, Europe should be a superpower, not a superstate. Faced with an increasingly powerful and authoritarian China, global heating, the challenge of AI, not to mention an aggressive Russia, chaotic Middle East and Trumpian United States, this argument is more compelling than ever. In a world of giants, you need to be a giant yourself. If we Europeans don’t hang together, we will hang separately.
Most Europeans agree with this simple proposition. Indeed, this is one of the big things they want the European Union to do. But is Europe up to the job? The answer is not a simple yes or no. It depends what dimension of power we are talking about. In trade negotiations, the EU, which represents the biggest and richest multinational single market in the world through a single negotiator, is already a superpower. It has made trade deals with major economies, such as Canada and Japan, of which Brexit Britain can only dream.
PM maintains that NHS is not on the table and animal welfare standards won’t drop
Boris Johnson has said he will drive a hard bargain as the UK outlined its negotiating objectives for the forthcoming trade talks with the US.
Despite fears that disagreements between London and Washington could obstruct the launch of the negotiations, a government press release claimed the prime minister wanted to open up opportunities for British businesses and investors while also ensuring the NHS was not for sale via the desired free trade agreement.
Bloc’s first UK ambassador says right to remain for many vulnerable Europeans must be protected
Prisoners and members of the Roma community, along with elderly people and the poorest in society, will be the focus of a new EU push to help Europeans “outside the mainstream” to remain in the UK after Brexit.
There are concerns that thousands of EU nationals will fail to apply to the Home Office to stay because they lack information or the means to see the digital application process through.