Category Archives: European Union

‘It is soul-destroying’: lorry drivers face hours stuck in queues at Dover

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Emergency traffic controls triggered 20 times this year as extra Brexit controls and freight volumes cause logjams

His lorry loaded with British Airways aircraft parts, Ivo Hradilik was expecting to drive onto a ferry headed to Calais, before delivering his cargo to the outskirts of Paris.

But there’s a problem with the customs paperwork, and the 26-year-old HGV driver from the Czech Republic will have to park up near the Port of Dover while the haulage company sorts everything out.

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Boris Johnson to try to regain control with Brexit bill and policy blitz

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PM hopes to move on from parties scandal with plans to make it easier to scrap EU laws and tackle cost of living crisis

Boris Johnson will attempt to seize back control of the government agenda this week with a policy blitz, a Brexit bill and flying visit to Ukraine, as Westminster remains in the grip of paralysis over the Sue Gray and police inquiries into No 10 parties.

Amid frustration in No 10 at the uncertainty surrounding the report on rule-breaking parties in Downing Street, sources said Johnson was determined to deflect public outrage with a schedule of high-profile announcements and photo opportunities that he also hopes will show MPs he remains focused.

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Fruit pickers lured to Portugal by the dream of a ‘raspberry passport’

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Farm workers from south Asia describe exploitative conditions at the heart of Europe’s soft fruits industry

Three days after Sagar* arrived as a worker in Portugal from Nepal, he began to worry he had made a terrible mistake. “I had expectations to get good work, good money,” he says. “But the reality was different.”

The only job Sagar, 21, could find was on one of the country’s berry farms in Odemira, a rural region on the south-west coast. Earning less than the legal minimum wage to work 16-hour days in 40C heat, he knows he is being exploited. But quitting could jeopardise his residency application – and that’s a risk he cannot afford to take.

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‘The day I left was the saddest of my life’: EU nationals on the pain of leaving UK

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They miss the trees, the curry, the friends … but most of all, they miss feeling the UK was somewhere they could call home

Everyone misses something. For some, it’s quite specific: PG Tips, Branston pickle, proper curry. For many, it’s more intangible: the atmosphere of an English pub; that greenness, everywhere; tolerance; and British openness.

Then they pause. Actually, many formerly British-resident EU nationals say, what they miss is an idea. Or, to be precise, the idea of Britain they had before 24 June 2016: all of them remember, in painful, pin-sharp detail, how they felt, and what they did, the morning after.

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Putin accuses Nato of ignoring Russia’s concerns as Ukraine crisis simmers

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Russian president’s first public comments on response to Moscow’s proposals come in readout of phone call with Macron

Vladimir Putin said the US and its Nato allies had ignored Russia’s main security concerns, but promised to continue talks with the west, in a call with Emmanuel Macron amid simmering tensions over possible war in Ukraine.

In his first public comments on US and Nato responses to Russian proposals to rewrite the post-cold war security architecture, Putin said Moscow’s concerns about the expansion of Nato and the deployment of strike weapons near its borders had not been taken into account, according to a Kremlin readout of the phone call with his French counterpart.

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Workers paid less than minimum wage to pick berries destined for UK supermarkets

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Exclusive: Workers in Portugal picking berries ending up on the shelves of Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and Tesco allege exploitative conditions

  • Photographs by Francesco Brembati for the Guardian

Farm workers in Portugal appear to have been working illegally long hours picking berries destined for Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Waitrose for less than the minimum wage, according to a Guardian investigation.

Speaking anonymously, for fear of retribution from their employers, workers claimed the hours listed on their payslips were often fewer than the hours they had actually worked.

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Macron says EU must start own dialogue with Russia over Ukraine

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France’s president hopes to restart four-ways talks between Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine

The EU must open its own talks with Russia rather than rely on Washington, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has said as he warned of the prospect of the “most tragic thing of all – war”.

In a wide-ranging speech in Strasbourg, Macron said it was not sufficient for the US to negotiate with the Kremlin over its threats to peace but that Europe needed to have its voice heard.

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£576,000 office renovations will save taxpayers money, EU official insists

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German MEP Rainer Wieland spent £20,000 on a light fitting and the same amount on bespoke doors

A vice-president of the European parliament is facing questions after it was revealed he had spent nearly €690,000 (£576,000) on lavish office renovations.

Rainer Wieland, a Christian Democrat MEP from Germany, spent €486,011 on a state-of-the-art office and €134,774 “showroom” next door, both built from scratch on the 15th floor of the European parliament in Brussels, according to a leaked report seen by the Guardian.

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EU could suspend Vanuatu visa-free travel over ‘golden passports’ scheme

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EU states set to vote on proposal after commission found deficiencies including ‘the granting of citizenship to applicants listed in Interpol’s databases’

The European Commission has proposed suspending a visa-free travel arrangement with Vanuatu due to concerns about the Pacific nation’s controversial “golden passports” scheme.

The proposed suspension, which still needs to be voted on by EU states, would prevent all holders of passports issued as of 25 May 2015 – when Vanuatu started issuing a substantial number of passports in exchange for investment – from travelling to the EU without a visa.

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France poised to lift blanket ban on UK travellers ‘by end of the week’

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Skiing holidays could soon be given the green light, following the ease of travel restrictions in the ‘next few days’

British skiers could soon be able to return to French slopes after an announcement that France is due to lift its blanket ban on non-essential travel from the UK.

The French government’s official spokesman, Gabriel Attal, said after a weekly cabinet meeting on Wednesday that Paris would ease travel restrictions from the UK to France in the next few days.

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‘Europe is sidelined’: Russia meets US in Geneva and Nato in Brussels

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EU leaders warn of consequences in response to further aggression against Ukraine

After months of sabre-rattling from Vladimir Putin over Ukraine, Russian officials have been on a diplomatic tour of Europe this week, meeting the US in Geneva and Nato in Brussels. Amid this diplomatic whirl, Europe’s biggest diplomatic club has been absent. The EU has no formal role in the talks, although its officials are drawing up possible sanctions to levy against Russia if the Kremlin decides to invade Ukraine.

The EU’s exclusion from talks on war and peace in its own backyard hurts. “Between Putin and Biden, Europe is sidelined,” ran a Le Monde headline last week. The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell,struck an insouciant note. “I don’t care,” he said when the BBC asked whether the US should have gone ahead with the Geneva talks. The Russians, he said, had “deliberately excluded the EU from any participation” but he had been assured by the US that “nothing will be agreed without our strong co-operation, coordination and participation”.

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David Sassoli, European parliament president, dies aged 65

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Tributes paid to senior EU figure who died early on Tuesday at a hospital in Italy

David Sassoli, the president of the European parliament whose final political intervention had been to oppose the building of walls on the EU’s borders, has been praised for his kindness following his death at the age of 65.

The former journalist, whose three-year term as speaker of the chamber was due to end next week, had been admitted to hospital in Aviano, in his native Italy, on Boxing Day following a “dysfunction of his immune system”. He died at 1.15am on Tuesday.

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EU parliament president David Sassoli’s Christmas message, the last before his death – video

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David Sassoli, the president of the European parliament, has died at the age of 65, his spokesperson has said, after a serious illness for which he was hospitalised for more than two weeks. In December, Sassoli posted what would be his last video message, in which he expressed hope for women's rights and solidarity

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Meet Mr Trash Wheel – and the other ingenious tools that eat river plastic

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From ‘bubble barriers’ to floating drones, a host of new projects aim to stop plastic pollution before it ever reaches the ocean

The Great Bubble Barrier is just that – a wall of bubbles. It gurgles across the water in a diagonal screen, pushing plastic to one side while allowing fish and other wildlife to pass unharmed.

The technology, created by a Dutch firm and already being used in Amsterdam, is being trialled in the Douro River in Porto, Portugal, as part of the EU-supported Maelstrom (marine litter sustainable removal and management) project.

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France to push for EU-wide UK migration treaty over Channel crossings

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French government wants whole bloc to act despite warnings other member states have no appetite

France will press the EU to negotiate an asylum and migration treaty with the UK in an attempt to deter people from making the dangerous Channel crossing.

The French government, which last week took up the six-month rotating presidency of the EU council of ministers, wants the whole bloc to act, despite warnings that other member states have no appetite for a migration treaty with Britain.

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A data ‘black hole’: Europol ordered to delete vast store of personal data

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EU police body accused of unlawfully holding information and aspiring to become an NSA-style mass surveillance agency

The EU’s police agency, Europol, will be forced to delete much of a vast store of personal data that it has been found to have amassed unlawfully by the bloc’s data protection watchdog. The unprecedented finding from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) targets what privacy experts are calling a “big data ark” containing billions of points of information. Sensitive data in the ark has been drawn from crime reports, hacked from encrypted phone services and sampled from asylum seekers never involved in any crime.

According to internal documents seen by the Guardian, Europol’s cache contains at least 4 petabytes – equivalent to 3m CD-Roms or a fifth of the entire contents of the US Library of Congress. Data protection advocates say the volume of information held on Europol’s systems amounts to mass surveillance and is a step on its road to becoming a European counterpart to the US National Security Agency (NSA), the organisation whose clandestine online spying was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

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Brexit changes will add to soaring costs in 2022, warn UK manufacturers

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Make UK says two-thirds of companies fear customs delays and red tape from new rules will further hamper supply chains

Manufacturers have warned that Brexit will add to soaring costs facing British industry, amid concerns that customs delays and red tape will rank among the biggest challenges for firms this year.

Make UK, the industry body representing 20,000 manufacturing firms of all sizes from across the country, said that while optimism among its members had grown, it was being undermined by the after-effects of the UK’s departure from the EU.

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US tells Putin to choose confrontation or dialogue over Ukraine

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Secretary of state Tony Blinken says coming week of talks is moment of truth for Russian president

The US has told Vladimir Putin to choose between dialogue and confrontation on the eve of a critical week of diplomacy over Ukraine as Russian troops remained massed along its borders.

Senior diplomats and military officers from the US and Russia held a working dinner in Geneva on Sunday evening before Monday’s formal negotiations to discuss Moscow’s demands. Those were set out last month in two draft treaties, one with the US and one with Nato. Much of their content is unacceptable to Washington and the alliance, most importantly a pledge that Ukraine will never be a Nato member.

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Lack of English speakers embarrasses Czech coalition

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The new government risks being isolated, particularly in the EU where English remains the working language, warn critics

When a new five-party coalition took office in the Czech Republic a week before Christmas, it was expected to herald a reaffirmation of the country’s Europhile and western credentials after years of ambivalence and hedging under an outgoing populist government.

Instead, the new administration – headed by Petr Fiala, a former political science professor who replaced the former oligarch Andrej Babiš as prime minister – has found its carefully crafted outward-looking image tarnished by embarrassing revelations about its members’ poor English-speaking skills.

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Desmond Tutu’s funeral and Kazakhstan clashes: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to Hong Kong

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