Category Archives: Europe

‘Dust is everywhere’: rare glimpse of how Michelangelo’s David is kept clean

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Florence museum boss compares process to cleaning a bathroom as media are granted privileged access

Michelangelo’s David is recognised as one of the most sublime works in the history of sculpture, but according to the director of Florence’s Accademia Gallery, dusting it is much like cleaning a bathroom.

“You know when you clean a bathroom, you clean and clean and think you’ve done a great job but then you spot some dust and wonder ‘where did that come from?’,” Cecilie Hollberg said on Monday. “This is what it’s like. Dust is everywhere.”

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China offers to deepen security ties with Hungary

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Beijing’s move comes at a time when Budapest’s relationship with its EU and Nato allies is at a low point

China has offered to deepen security cooperation with Hungary, underscoring Budapest’s warming ties with Beijing just as Hungarian officials snubbed a visiting delegation from Washington.

Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, met China’s minister of public security, Wang Xiaohong, on Friday.

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Councils call for funding help as more Ukrainian refugees become homeless

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Continuation of war has left more refugees unsettled, with councils stepping in to to relieve most cases of homelessness

Councils have called for urgent review of funding for Ukrainian refugees amid alarm that 9,000 have reported as homeless and many more are needing longer-term support – with no sign of the war ending after two years.

The government announced on Sunday that it would extend by another 18 months the three-year visas of Ukrainians who escaped the war.

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‘Europe must defend itself’: shadow of war in Ukraine looms over security conference

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With ongoing US support far from guaranteed, Ukraine urges Europe to back fight against Russia, for its own sake

On the top floor of Literaturhaus in Munich, the Ukrainian veteran Yuliia Paievska was asked to speak to the elite of the transatlantic security and political establishment, including Hillary Clinton and the Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, as they lunched on a three-course meal, served with military precision.

“We are the dogs of war,” Paievska said as she introduced herself, explaining how she had started out as a volunteer and then worked as the chief medic at a hospital on the frontline during the siege of Mariupol. “I had children die in my hands, civilians, elderly. I do not know how you can forgive that. Thousands of soldiers have gone through my hands, thousands of civilians, streams of blood, rivers of suffering.”

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Kremlin accused of ‘covering tracks’ as whereabouts of Alexei Navalny’s body remain uncertain

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Outrage over jailed opposition leader’s death grows with detention of over 350 people in Russia who attended vigils

Alexei Navalny’s allies have accused the Kremlin of “covering their tracks” as, two days after the imprisoned opposition leader’s death in custody, uncertainty continued to surround the whereabouts of his body and what it may reveal about how he died.

Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, and his lawyer travelled over the weekend to the notorious “Polar Wolf” IK-3 penal colony in Russia’s Arctic north, where Navalny had been held since last year, to track down his body, but received contradicting information from various institutions over its location and left without recovering or seeing her son.

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What next for Putin? After Navalny’s death, many fear what leader will move on to

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With Ukraine retreating and western sanctions having little impact, the Russian president is growing bolder and may embark on more reckless moves

Vladimir Putin smiled and looked unusually festive on Friday as he praised factory workers and joked with state reporters at an industrial plant in the Ural city of Chelyabinsk.

Putin’s confidence was unmistakable – a sign of his full belief that he would get away with the death that day of his biggest critic in jail while outlasting Ukraine on the battlefield.

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Gang of alleged armed robbers in their 60s and 70s arrested in Italy

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Six were known to Rome’s criminal underworld for tenacity in carrying out burglaries at post offices

A gang of six alleged robbers in their 60s and 70s known in Rome’s criminal underworld for their tenacity in carrying out a series of armed burglaries at post offices in the city have been arrested by police in Italy.

The gang’s leaders were 70-year-old Italo De Witt, nicknamed “the German”, who became renowned in the mid-1990s after a sophisticated heist of a bank near the Spanish Steps, and a 75-year-old who played the role of lookout.

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France should return much more looted African art, film-maker says

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Mati Diop, the director of Dahomey, which charts the restitution of 26 objects to Benin, says the tiny number involved is ‘humiliating’

The first major return of looted treasures from Europe to Africa in the 21st century has left a lingering feeling of humiliation because of the lack of follow-up action, a French-Senegalese film-maker who accompanied a hoard of artefacts on their journey from Paris to their country of origin has said.

In her film Dahomey, which premiered at the Berlin film festival on Sunday, the director, Mati Diop, documents the 2021 journey of 26 treasures that the commander of French forces in Senegal looted from the royal palace of the kingdom of Dahomey, part of modern-day Benin, in 1890.

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Ukraine war: Russia says it has full control over Ukrainian town of Avdiivka – as it happened

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Russian troops have full control and have advanced 8.6km beyond that region of frontline, Russian news agencies say

Responding to US Republican senator JD Vance on a panel at the Munich Security Conference on Sunday, German politician Ricarda Lang pushed back at the idea of a deal with Russia.

Putin has shown over and over again – and he just showed this with the murder of Navalny on Friday – that he has no interest in peace at the moment. That he does not want peace.

So if you say we stop supporting Ukraine, stop giving weapons to them, you are not having some scenario where this leads to peace, but at the moment this leads to two scenarios: either you are prolonging this war, or you give up Ukraine and Putin wins.

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Ukrainians can extend UK visas by 18 months in new scheme

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Refugees will have ‘certainty and assurance’ says Home Office, but charities say move insufficient as many face homelessness

Ukrainians who sought sanctuary in the UK after the Russian invasion will be permitted to extend their visas for an extra 18 months, the Home Office has announced.

More than 200,000 Ukrainians visa holders have arrived in the UK since March 2022, with the first visas to expire in March next year. The Home Office said that the new scheme would provide “certainty and assurance” for Ukrainians in the UK.

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‘They’re doing everything to avoid handing over his body’: Kremlin plays for time after Navalny’s death

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In Russia, the battle to eradicate the opposition leader and his legacy will continue long after his death

In Russia, it is not enough to kill an opposition leader. His ageing mother must travel to the Arctic Circle to search a prison colony and a morgue for his body. Russians with the temerity to lay carnations in his memory must be detained.

Even a preliminary cause of death, “sudden death syndrome”, was misleading, as though his death behind bars was not years in the making.

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Volodymyr Zelenskiy pleads for more arms as frontline Ukrainian city falls

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Retreat from Avdiivka deals military blow and hands initiative to Putin as war’s second anniversary looms

Volodymyr Zelenskiy issued a desperate plea for fresh arms on Saturday as his army commanders announced that Ukrainian troops were pulling out of the key eastern city of Avdiivka, handing Moscow its first major military victory since last May, just days before the second anniversary of the Russian invasion.

Ukraine’s leader told the Munich Security Conference that the slowing of weapons supplies was having a direct impact on the frontline and was forcing Ukraine to cede territory.

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From beehive to kitchen table: UK beekeepers call for new law to trace honey’s origin

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British producers to back EU’s proposed regulations to stop trade in adulterated honey

Britain’s beekeepers are backing ­proposed new rules to combat fraud in the supply chain, ensuring a jar of honey can be traced on its journey of up to 5,000 miles from the beehive to the shop shelf.

The European parliament has agreed new labelling rules and a project to establish a traceability system for honey from harvesting to the consumer. The proposed rules are part of an overhaul of the “breakfast directives”, including the honey directive.

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Death of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny confirmed by his representatives

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Russian opposition leader’s death occurred on Friday, say supporters, but official cause remains disputed

The death of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, has been confirmed by his representatives, who are calling for the return of his body amid confusion over the cause of the death of Putin’s once most significant political challenger.

Navalny, 47, died in jail on 16 February at 2.17pm local time, said his official spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, citing a message from Navalny’s mother and challenging Russia’s official explanation that Navalny died after a fall at the Arctic penal colony where he was being held.

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Biden threatened ‘consequences’ over Navalny, but he has few options

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Sanctions already imposed on Russia over Ukraine have not deterred the Kremlin. Will unconventional approaches work?

When Joe Biden met Vladimir Putin in 2021, the leaders staring at each other across the library of a Geneva lakeside villa, the US president warned there would be “devastating consequences” for Moscow if Alexei Navalny died in Russian custody.

Biden was reminded of those words on Friday following Navalny’s sudden, mysterious death in a Russian penal colony, and his response was to point out that the warning had been delivered three years ago and that, in the intervening time, Putin had “faced a hell of a lot of consequences”.

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‘He was our hero’: six Russians on the death of Alexei Navalny

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Views on what the future might hold at a pivotal moment for the country’s fractured pro-democracy movement

Western leaders have held Vladimir Putin responsible for Alexei Navalny’s death in prison, where he had been sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime”.

Navalny’s death – a pivotal moment for the country’s fractured pro-democracy movement – sent waves of anger and despair through the ranks of his supporters in Russia and abroad.

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Spain’s conservative party fears defeat in its Galician heartland

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Close-run race could see PP ousted and Ana Pontón of BNG installed as area’s first female and nationalist leader

Spain’s opposition conservative party faces the prospect of defeat in its leader’s home region, where it has governed for much of the past four decades, when voters in Galicia go to the polls on Sunday.

The People’s party (PP) won an absolute majority four years ago under the then regional president, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who now leads the national party, but polls suggest its declining fortunes could open the door to a coalition of the Socialist party and the surging Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG).

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Alexei Navalny death: protesters gather across Europe to express outrage and denounce Putin

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Demonstrators from Berlin to Vilnius, London to Rome chant slogans against Russian president and demand accountability over death

Hundreds of protesters, many of them Russian émigrés, gathered in cities across Europe and beyond on Friday to express their outrage over the death of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.

Often gathering outside Russian embassies, they chanted slogans critical of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, whom many blame for the activist’s death, holding up signs calling him a “killer” and demanding accountability.

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Alexei Navalny death: Biden blames Putin and ‘his thugs’ as Russians pay tribute at makeshift memorials – latest updates

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US president joins world leaders in outrage at Putin critic’s death in Russian prison as EU says he was ‘slowly murdered’ by regime

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said today that Russia’s penitentiary service was making all checks regarding the death of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, but that he had no information about the matter, Reuters reports.

The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in jail, the country’s prison service has said, in what is likely to be seen as a political assassination attributable to Vladimir Putin.

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Western leaders point finger at Putin after Alexei Navalny’s death in jail

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Russian opposition leader’s death described as political assassination attributable to president

Western leaders have held Vladimir Putin directly responsible for the death of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, as the US president, Joe Biden, called it “yet more proof of Putin’s brutality”.

Navalny, 47, died while being held in a jail about 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where he had been sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime”.

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