‘Spotters’ were seen scoping out movements of Mark Rutte, who cycles to work in The Hague
The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, who cycles to work in The Hague, has reportedly been given extra personal security in response to raised fears of a kidnapping or attack by organised crime.
The decision was made after “spotters” were seen scoping out Rutte’s movements, raising concerns about a possible move by one of the country’s drug gangs.
Continue reading...Former Afghan government’s ambassador in Greece appalled by Athens’ media blitz against ‘illegal migrant flows’
In other times, Mirwais Samadi would have welcomed a campaign to deter his compatriots from opting to become illegal migrants and embarking on the often dangerous trek from Afghanistan to Europe.
By far the worst part of his job as Afghanistan’s ambassador to Athens – apart from the strange limbo he has found himself in representing a nation whose leaders he refuses to recognise – is notifying families back home of loved ones who died along the way. Invariably they are the victims of smuggling networks motivated solely by profit.
Continue reading...Pandemic behind biggest fall in life expectancy in western Europe since second world war, say researchers
The Covid pandemic has caused the biggest decrease in life expectancy in western Europe since the second world war, according to a study.
Data from most of the 29 countries – spanning most of Europe, the US and Chile – that were analysed by scientists recorded reductions in life expectancy last year and at a scale that wiped out years of progress.
Continue reading...Official preliminary results show SPD secured 25.7% of the vote and CDU won 24.1%
If you speak some German, here’s an interesting analysis from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which suggests that Germany wanted change – but also not really, noting that the election results throw up more questions than they answer.
“Germans longed for new horizons, but in the end they didn’t really trust themselves, “ the authors write. They discuss Germans changing allegiances in the run up to the poll, and make the point that never before has the strongest party in the Bundestag been simultaneously so weak.
Bei der Bundestagswahl wollte Deutschland den Wechsel - aber nicht so ganz. Warum das so ist - eine Analyse in Daten und Grafiken. #btw #ddj https://t.co/Lj2bw11MAF
It’s just past 6am in Germany, where people are waking up to the official preliminary results of Sunday’s federal election. If you’re just joining us, here’s a brief summary of what they were:
Continue reading...‘Marriage for All’ proposal backed by 64.1% of voters in nationwide referendum
Swiss voters have decided by a clear margin to allow same-sex couples to marry, in a referendum that brings the Alpine nation into line with many others in western Europe.
Official results showed the measure passed with 64.1% of voters in favour and won a majority in all of Switzerland’s 26 cantons.
Continue reading...Katrín Jakobsdóttir’s future as PM in doubt as Left-Green Movement loses ground to rightwing partners
Iceland has become the first country in Europe to have more women than men in parliament, a day after a general election that left the future of the prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, in doubt despite her left-right coalition winning a clear majority.
Of the 63 seats in the Althing parliament, 33 – or 52% – were won by women, projections based on the final results showed on Sunday. No other European country has had more than 50% female lawmakers, with Sweden coming closest at 47%, according to data compiled by the World Bank.
Continue reading...Vibrantly illustrated Sephardic Jewish book is believed to have been made in Spain in the 14th century
Seven centuries after it was created, a priceless Sephardic Jewish book whose wine-stained pages have somehow survived exile, the Inquisition, the rise and fall of an empire, two world wars and the Bosnian conflict, is making a homecoming. Of sorts.
The codex, known as the Sarajevo Haggadah after the city where it has been kept since at least 1894, is thought to have been made in north-east Spain in about 1350, possibly as a wedding present to mark the union of two prominent Jewish families.
Continue reading...Landlocked state within central Italy is one of last places in Europe with total ban on abortion
Residents in San Marino are voting over whether or not to lift a ban on abortion following a tense referendum campaign.
The extremely conservative landlocked state within central Italy, which has a population of about 33,000, is one of the last places in Europe that has a total ban on abortion.
Continue reading...A coalition is inevitable but there are likely to be months of complicated negotiations in the months ahead
Polling stations have opened in Germany as the nation decides who will succeed in the race to replace Angela Merkel as chancellor after 16 years.
As final rallies were held across the country by the the main candidates on Saturday, with polls showing the lead held by the Social Democrats’ Olaf Scholz over Armin Laschet of the Christian Democrats to have narrowed to a tiny margin, voter participation among the more than 60 million Germans eligible to vote, was predicted to be high.
Continue reading...It’s Auf Wiedersehen to the chancellor this weekend as Germany goes to the polls. But what has been her impact on politics across Europe and on the global stage?
The filmmaker and gay rights activist Rosa von Praunheim once confessed that he loved Angela Merkel, but hated her Christian Democratic Union party.
This sense of Merkel as a morally attractive, quasi-presidential figure above petty partisanship is widely shared within Germany and abroad: during the Donald Trump years she was lauded as the last defender of the liberal international order; Boris Johnson described her last week as a “titan” of diplomacy; and even Alexis Tsipras, the hapless leftwing Greek prime minister who was forced by Merkel into years of austerity, cannot help but admire her “sincerity”.
Continue reading...Tough controls on immigration, a restricted role for European courts, a new politics of patriotism: why is the EU’s former Brexit chief negotiator, now running for the French presidency, sounding more and more like a Eurosceptic? As his Brexit diaries are published in English, he reveals all
My Secret Brexit Diary, Michel Barnier’s blow-by-blow account of the Brexit negotiations, is at times quite a dry and technical read. But every now and then it offers glorious moments of comic relief. There is, for example, the day that Lord Digby Jones and a jovial bunch of leave-voting businessmen pitch up optimistically at Barnier’s Brussels office, plonking a patriotic gift-basket on his desk. Running his eye over it, the European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator spies some cheddar, wine, tea and jam, a book of Shakespeare’s plays and an essay on Winston Churchill’s life and political philosophy. With a smile, Barnier points out that some of the foodstuffs are processed from European products and protected by EU designations of origin. As for Shakespeare and Churchill, one, he suggests, was a very “continental playwright” and the other a “very European British statesman” who backed a united Europe.
This false start is the prelude to some unsuccessful lobbying by the British delegation on behalf of the City’s financial services industry. When Barnier bats away demands for full post-Brexit access to European markets, he writes that the mood suddenly turns sour: “Digby Jones dares to say to me: ‘Mr Barnier, your position is contrary to the interests of the economy. You are going to make life even more difficult for the worker in the Ruhr, the single woman in Madrid or the unemployed man in Athens.’” The rhetoric and tone, concludes Barnier in his diary entry for 10 January 2018, was “morally outrageous”; the desired bespoke agreement on financial services never materialises.
Continue reading...In June 1940, a Dutch salesman, acting as a consul in Lithuania, issued Jewish refugees with pseudo visas to escape Europe. His remarkable story is only now being told
He helped save more Jewish lives than Oskar Schindler, but while the brave deeds of the German industrialist were known around the world because of an Oscar-winning film, few know the name Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch radio salesman who helped thousands of Jews flee Nazi-occupied Europe.
Now a book by the celebrated Dutch writer Jan Brokken seeks to rescue Zwartendijk from obscurity, as well as other courageous officials who bent the rules to help several thousand Jews trapped between Nazi Europe and the Soviet Union.
Continue reading...The country’s model for managing its trees is bad for biodiversity… and political unity
Forest-owner Lars-Erik Levin doesn’t seem like an environmental villain. As he walks through his 80 hectares (198 acres) of woodland in southern Sweden, he identifies goldcrests by their song, points out a cauliflower fungus and shows off the aspen in his wood that grouse feed on. This year he’s picked more than 100kg of chanterelles, and even more bilberries.
But this is the part of the property he manages by so-called continuous cover forestry, where he claims he only fells trees with trunks so thick his arms no longer reach around them. On the other side of his farmhouse is a wide-open space the size of two football pitches, where, five years ago, he cut the forest to the stumps. Little now remains but grass, brambles and young, waist-high spruce. “Animals and birds have legs and wings, they can move a little,” he protests when asked what happened to the wildlife.
Continue reading...The country faces ‘Dutch-style’ political era with main parties neck and neck before Sunday’s poll
Germany is braced to enter a new “Dutch-style” political era after federal elections on Sunday, as a knife-edge vote points to months of complicated coalition wrangling.
Outgoing chancellor Angela Merkel joined the campaign trail at a rally in the western city of Aachen on Friday night in an attempt to help her designated successor from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Armin Laschet, close the gap on the centre-left Social Democratic party (SPD).
Continue reading...Serious themes are undercut by the flippant tone of this story about a Syrian refugee who becomes a conceptual art object
Here is a muddled caper of movie that doesn’t know what it wants to say; it doesn’t work as a satire of the international art market, nor as a commentary on the racism of white European culture. And its attitude to Syria is undermined by a silly and unconvincing ending that leaves a strange taste in the mouth. It is inspired by the Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye and his human artwork called Tim: in 2008, Delvoye tattooed an elaborate punk-crucifixion scene on the back of a Zurich tattoo parlour owner named Tim Steiner, who in return for a cash payment agreed to sit still with his tattooed back on show in galleries for a certain number of times a year and have his tattooed skin surgically removed and put on display after his death. And of course it is this macabre destiny that lends fascination to the ongoing live events.
This movie from writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania imagines a Syrian man, Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni) in love with a well-born woman Abeer (Dea Liane). But when he is wrongfully arrested by the tyrannical Assad government, Abeer’s family pressures her into marrying a smooth diplomat, Ziad (Saad Lostan), who takes her to live with him in Brussels where he is an embassy attache. Sam Ali manages to escape from police custody (the least of the film’s implausibilities) and get over the border into Lebanon where, hungry and hard up, he gatecrashes art exhibitions and gobbles the free canapes. And this is where he is approached by a preeningly arrogant artist, Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw), who looks like Roger De Bris, the theatre director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers. If Sam will agree to the humiliation of having a massive “Schengen visa” tattooed on his back, then Jeffrey will be legally able to transport him to Brussels as a conceptual art object rather than a human being, as part of a show about the commodification of humanity, and Sam will be able to see Abeer.
Continue reading...A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Germany
Continue reading...There are signs that previously struggling social democratic parties are drawing the right lessons from the pandemic
In the wake of the financial crash in 2008, hopes were high on the left that a bona fide crisis of capitalism would significantly shift the political dial in its favour. Isolated victories and movements aside, it didn’t really happen. Instead, in the early 2010s, the bailout of the bankers was followed by the imposition of austerity across Europe and in America as governments sought to balance the books.
Premature predictions on the nature of post-Covid politics in the west are therefore to be avoided. But certain themes do seem to be emerging. Sketching out broadly communitarian territory, they chime with many people’s experience of how the pandemic played out and what it exposed; and there is some evidence that, in northern Europe, they might inform a revival and renewal of centre-left parties and movements.
Continue reading...A coalition appears inevitable after two surveys suggest almost equal support for CDU and former favourite
The race to succeed Angela Merkel as German chancellor remains completely open two days before western Europe’s most populous country goes to the polls, with the latest predictions showing the leading parties almost neck and neck.
Two leading polls published on Friday ahead of Sunday’s election indicate the Social Democrats (SPD) have lost their lead over the Christian Democrats (CDU). One, carried out by Civey for the broadcaster ZDF, showed the SPD to be stable on 25%, but the CDU to have risen to 23%. A poll released later in the day for the polling institute Allensbach for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung showed the race to be even tighter, with the SPD on 26%, the CDU on 25%.
Continue reading...Boris Johnson believed to have overruled ministers unwilling to compromise on post-Brexit immigration as forecourt queues mount
Ministers are poised to agree an extraordinary post-Brexit U-turn that would allow foreign lorry drivers back into the UK to stave off shortages threatening fuel and food supplies.
Boris Johnson ordered a rapid fix on Friday to prevent the crisis escalating. Ministers met in an attempt to agree a short-term visa scheme permitting potentially thousands more lorry drivers from abroad to come to the UK.
Continue reading...Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Éric Zemmour slug it out in much-publicised two-hour debate
Two men; two completely different visions for France.
In a debate that lasted more than two hours, the hard-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the hard-right Éric Zemmour, expected to be a presidential candidate, went head to head on prime-time television on Thursday evening.
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