Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Paris’s concerns about UK demands are widely shared, analysts, politicians and EU diplomats say
Emmanuel Macron may be talking tougher than the rest of the EU27 as Brexit talks reach their endgame, but despite claims to the contrary in London and by a UK media that always enjoys pointing fingers across the Channel, France is far from isolated.
Headlines such as “Le bust-up” and “France derails Brexit talks” do not reflect European reality, analysts, politicians and EU diplomats have insisted, saying Paris’s fundamental concerns are widely shared across the EU27.
Heirs of Jewish art dealers bring case over Guelph Treasure that defence lawyers say could open floodgates
A 12-year wrangle over a rare collection of medieval ecclesiastical art sold by Jewish art dealers to the Nazis in 1935 will arrive in front of the highest court in the US on Monday, in a landmark case defence lawyers say could open the floodgates for restitution battles from all over the world to be fought via the US.
The supreme court will hear oral arguments on whether the dealers’ heirs can sue in US courts to retrieve the church reliquaries, known as the Guelph Treasure or Welfenschatz, from Germany.
UK PM and European commission president to speak on Saturday after negotiators fail to reach agreement
The Brexit talks will enter their final act on Saturday with a shift to direct negotiations between Boris Johnson and the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, following the failure to find agreement in London.
In a joint statement, David Frost, the UK’s chief negotiator, and his EU counterpart, Michel Barnier, said they had not been able to come to terms on the final issues and that the historic trade and security negotiation would be paused.
Politicians, health professionals and commentators in Europe and the US have questioned Britain’s decision to fast-track approval of a coronavirus vaccine and criticised what some saw as the jingoistic tone of its announcement.
The UK on Wednesday became the first country in the world to approve a Covid-19 vaccine when the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) granted the Pfizer/BioNTech shot emergency authorisation for clinical use.
Communication aid was altered in 1934 because original version was deemed ‘too Jewish’
Germany is to scrap its phonetic spelling table introduced by the Nazis 86 years ago and temporarily replace it with the version the regime abolished because it was “too Jewish”.
The table, in which codewords are assigned to each letter of the alphabet to aid communication and avoid confusion, particularly in radio transmissions and telephone calls, originated in the late 19th century. In 1934 it was adapted by the Nazis who cleansed it of all its Jewish names as part of the regime’s drive to reject all Jews from German life, which culminated in the Holocaust.
France will carry out random border checks over the holiday season targeting French skiers on their way to and from foreign resorts – particularly Switzerland and Spain – where slopes stay open, the prime minister, Jean Castex, has said.
“The goal is to avoid French citizens getting contaminated. That will be done by performing random checks at the borders,” Castex told French television, adding that returning holidaymakers would be ordered to quarantine for seven days.
A car drove at high speed into a pedestrian zone in the south-western German city of Trier on Tuesday, killing four people, including a baby, and seriously injuring 15, officials said. The driver, identified as a 51-year-old German man from the area, was arrested at the scene. 'We see these pictures again and again on television, and we always think that this cannot happen in Trier,' the mayor, Wolfram Leibe, said after visiting the site. 'I'm speechless'
Diplomats call on UK, France and Germany to map out task facing incoming Biden administration
France, Germany and the UK must move quickly to set out a roadmap for Iran and the incoming Biden administration in the US to come back into compliance with the nuclear deal, some of Europe’s leading diplomats have said.
They warn that unless the three countries, known as the E3, coordinate a joint public statement setting out what both sides must do to end the impasse, there is a real risk that Joe Biden will come to power facing only escalating tensions with Iran.
Only sawdust remains at site of Bavarian mystery statue that has gained celebrity status among alpine hikers
German police have opened an investigation into the disappearance of a large wooden sculpture of a phallus from a mountainside where it appeared without explanation several years ago.
The two-metre-tall (7ft) sculpture appeared to have been chopped down over the weekend, local newspaper Allgaeuer Zeitung reported on Monday, leaving behind only a pile of sawdust on the 1,738m-high (5,702ft) Grünten mountain, in southern Bavaria, 140km south-west of Munich.
British tourists, chalet owners and resort staff wait for winter season decisions across Europe
British holidaymakers, chalet owners and resort staff are in limbo as countries across Europe decide whether or not this winter’s ski season will go ahead.
This week, Britain’s biggest ski operator Crystal Ski Holidays was forced to cancel all its French ski trips in December after President Macron ordered the nation’s resorts to stay shut until the new year.
Governments are at odds over a Europe-wide plan to bar ski holidays over Christmas and new year, with Germany, Italy and France in favour but Austria and Switzerland reluctant to damage a sector worth billions to their economies.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, on Thursday joined Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in calling for a Europe-wide shutdown of winter sports until 10 January to avert a fresh coronavirus wave.
Foreign ministers hope US will lift sanctions in effort to revive 2015 agreement with Tehran
European foreign ministers from Germany, France and the UK have met to discuss a joint approach with the incoming Joe Biden administration on reviving the Iranian nuclear deal.
The three nations, whose ministers met in Berlin, are hoping Tehran can reach an agreement under which the US would lift its crippling sanctions in return for Iran ending its non-compliance with the 2015 agreement constraining its nuclear activities.
The film about the Stasi spying on East German lovers was seen as too dark, with one funder even wanting it remade as a comedy. But it went on to win an Oscar
In winter 1997, during my first year at film school in Munich, I was lying on the floor listening to music. I started thinking about how Lenin once told his best friend that he couldn’t listen to his favourite piano sonata as often as he would like, because it made him soft, and might stop him from wanting to hurt the people he needed to hurt. Suddenly, an image came to my mind: a man with headphones, in a bleak and depressing attic, secretly listening to his enemies, but thereby involuntarily hearing the kind of music he has been avoiding his entire life. I opened my laptop, started typing and within about an hour had written the outline of the movie.
AstraZeneca will have 200m doses of its candidate vaccine developed by the University of Oxford by the end of 2020, with 700m ready globally by the end of the first quarter of 2021, operations executive Pam Cheng has said.
Cheng told a briefing that there would be 20m doses in the UK by the end of the year, with 70m more for the UK by the end of March that year.
Pope Francis can relate to people in intensive care units who fear dying from coronavirus because of his own experience when part of his lung was removed 63 years ago, he has been quoted as saying.
The comments are included in excerpts of a new book “Let Us Dream: The Path to A Better Future”, which are carried in Italian newspapers on Monday ahead of publication of the full work next month.
I know from experience the feeling of those who are sick with coronavirus, struggling to breathe as they are attached to a ventilator.
They took about a litre and a half of water out of one lung and I was hanging between life and death.
[The experience] changed my bearings. For months, I didn’t know who I was, if I would live or die, even the doctors didn’t know. I remember hugging my mother one day and asking her if I was about to die.
Thanks to her regular contact with sick people, she knew what patients needed better than the doctor and had the courage to put that experience to work.
German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, on Sunday lashed out at anti-mask protesters comparing themselves to Nazi victims, accusing them of trivialising the Holocaust and “making a mockery” of the courage shown by resistance fighters.
The harsh words came after a young woman took to the stage at a protest against coronavirus restrictions in Hanover on Saturday saying she felt “just like Sophie Scholl”, the German student executed by the Nazis in 1943 for her role in the resistance.
On the anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg trials, 90-year-old Colette Marin-Catherine confronts her past by visiting the Nazi concentration camp in Germany where her brother was killed. As a young girl, she had been a member of the French resistance and had always refused to set foot in Germany. That changes when a young history student named Lucie enters her life. Prepared to reopen old wounds and revisit the terrors of that time, Marin-Catherine offers important lessons
Filmmaker Anthony Giacchino and producer Alice Doyard explain how a young history student persuaded Colette, 90, to visit the German concentration camp where her brother died
The new Guardian documentary, Colette, follows the remarkable story of a former member of the French resistance, as she travels to Germany for the first time to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp where her brother died 75 years ago. Persuaded to go on the journey by history student Lucie, 17, the pair support one another through an emotional journey into the past. “When I cross into Germany I’ll never be the same again,” says Colette, 90.
Suspect, who is serving time for drug conviction, sustains two broken ribs in incident
A suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the British toddler who vanished from a Portuguese resort 13 years ago, sustained two broken ribs in an incident in a German court, authorities have said.
The incident occurred after Christian Brückner, who is serving time for a drug conviction, was taken to Braunschweig state court on Monday for a routine hearing on that case.
More than 1,600 officers involved in raids in Berlin following museum robbery last November
Police have raided apartments across Berlin and detained three people suspected of involvement in a jewel heist at a museum housing one of Europe’s greatest collections of treasures.
Thieves forced their way into the Grünes Gewölbe or Green Vault Museum in Dresden in November last year and got away with at least three sets of early 18th-century jewellery, including diamonds and rubies.
Angela Merkel has said she does not have backing among state leaders for new restrictions to give Germany’s “soft” lockdown a harder bite, postponing any decision until a further meeting between the chancellor and 16 state premiers next week.
The chancellor had been in favour of people limiting social interactions in private to only one set second household, and forgo any kind of party until Christmas Eve, according to a draft proposal cited by several news outlets including Der Spiegel.