Category Archives: Europe

Armani’s menswear confirms in-person future of Milan fashion week

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Italian designer says fashion cannot survive in exclusively virtual form

Such is Giorgio Armani’s eagerness for getting back to holding physical fashion shows that not even a nasty fall resulting in a fractured shoulder and 17 stitches 20 days ago could stop him from holding his first show in 16 months on Monday evening in Milan.

Addressing the rumours that he had recently been in hospital, the 86-year-old designer explained to waiting press after taking his bow at his spring/summer 2022 menswear show that he fell down the stairs while leaving the cinema but wanted to reassure everyone that he was fine and still raring to go.

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German army appoints first rabbi as religious counsellor in 100 years

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Hungarian-born Zsolt Balla speaks of his ‘historic responsibility’ to serve Jewish soldiers

The German army has installed its first rabbi as a religious counsellor in 100 years, in a symbol of the renewal of Jewish life decades after the Holocaust.

Priests and pastors are already providing religious services to the estimated 94,000 Christians in the military.

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EU prepares to cut amount of British TV and film shown post-Brexit

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Exclusive: number of UK productions seen as ‘disproportionate’ and threat to Europe’s cultural diversity

The EU is preparing to act against the “disproportionate” amount of British television and film content shown in Europe in the wake of Brexit, in a blow to the UK entertainment industry and the country’s “soft power” abroad.

The UK is Europe’s biggest producer of film and TV programming, buoyed up by £1.4bn from the sale of international rights, but its dominance has been described as a threat to Europe’s “cultural diversity” in an internal EU document seen by the Guardian.

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Why can’t world leaders agree that a nuclear war should never be fought? | Jane Kinninmont

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Biden and Putin must persuade other nuclear states that such a conflict ‘should never be fought’

Meeting last week, the US and Russian presidents issued a joint statement declaring: “a nuclear war should never be fought and could never be won”. This consciously echoes what Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev said in a landmark summit in 1985, when the US and USSR started to step up nuclear arms control, and gradually reduced the world’s fear of nuclear catastrophe.

Many reports of the Biden-Putin summit have not even mentioned this joint statement, because it sounds like simple common sense. Who wants a nuclear war?

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Les Hijabeuses: the female footballers tackling France’s on-pitch hijab ban

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Young players excluded from matches because of their religious dress find a way to play on and encourage other hijab-wearing women into the sport

Founé Diawara was 15 years old when she was first told she could not wear her hijab in a football match.

It was an important game. She had recently got into the team of a club in Meaux, the town north-east of Paris where she grew up, and they were playing a local rival. Diawara had been wearing her hijab during training, but as she was about to walk on to the pitch, the referee said she must remove it if she wanted to play.

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Swedish PM Stefan Löfven loses no-confidence vote

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Premier is first in country’s history to be ousted by opposition MPs and has a week to decide next move

Sweden’s parliament has backed a no-confidence vote in the centre-left prime minister, Stefan Löfven, making him the first premier to be ousted by opposition MPs in the country’s history and giving him a week to resign or call snap elections.

The vote, called by the nationalist Sweden Democrats barely a year before a general election, plunges Sweden back into political uncertainty four years after the last inconclusive poll produced a deadlocked parliament and led to months of negotiations to form a coalition.

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Princess Latifa: Instagram image appears to show Dubai ruler’s daughter in Spain

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Princess, who was seized trying to flee the sheikhdom in 2018, has appeared in several social media posts in recent months

A Dubai princess who has been the subject of concern from a United Nations panel after being seized trying to flee the sheikhdom in 2018 has appeared in a social media post that described her as being in Spain on a “European holiday.”

An Instagram image published by a woman identified in British media as former Royal Navy member Sioned Taylor shows Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum at Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport.

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Hungary’s LGBT protests and Juneteenth Day: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms from China to Colombia

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Woman to stand trial in France for killing stepfather after years of abuse

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Valérie Bacot, who had four children with alleged abuser, will say she believed he would kill them all

On Monday, a French woman, Valérie Bacot, will walk into a court to be tried for killing her stepfather turned husband. She has admitted shooting him dead and believes she should be punished.

In her defence, she is expected to tell the the hearing at at Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy how Daniel “Dany” Polette made her life hell from the day he raped her when she was 12, to the day he died 24 years later while prostituting her.

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New EU rules would permit use of most polymers without checks, experts warn

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Proposals would allow common plastics to be used despite valid concerns about possible harms, scientists say

New rules on chemicals to be debated by the EU this week would allow most polymers to be used without further checks, according to a group of scientists.

Only about 6% out of about 200,000 polymers would require extensive safety checks under proposals being discussed as part of Europe’s Reach chemicals regulations.

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‘Slap in the face’ for Macron as French voters shun local elections

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Abstention rate estimated at 68%, and exit polls suggest Le Pen’s National Rally failed to get expected support

Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party received what one of its own MPs called a “slap in the face” in regional and department elections on Sunday.

The president and his government failed to mobilise supporters, with an estimated 68% of voters shunning the polling stations – an unprecedented rate of abstention. If there was any consolation for the ruling party it was that exit polls suggested Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally had failed to garner its expected support.

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Bee-friendly urban wildflower meadows prove a hit with German city dwellers

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Countrywide scheme is flourishing after being set up to reverse a 75% decline in insect populations

To escape the Berlin bustle on a summer afternoon, all that Derek O’Doyle and his dog Frida have to do is lap the noisy building site outside their inner-city apartment, weave their way through the queue in front of the ice-cream van, and squeeze between two gridlocked lorries to cross over Baerwaldstrasse.

Bordered by a one-way traffic system lies a bucolic 1,720 sq metre haven as colourful as a Monet landscape: blue cornflowers, red poppies, white cow parsley and purple field scabious dot a sea of nettles and wild grass as armies of insects buzz through the air. Two endangered carpenter bees, larger than their honey bee cousins and with pitch-black abdomens, gorge themselves on a bush of yellow gorse.

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Body discovered after search for Belgian far-right soldier

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Initial evidence indicates body found in woods is that of Jurgen Conings

Belgian police have said a body has been found in the search for a fugitive far-right soldier who was the target of a huge manhunt.

Hundreds of security forces scoured a swath of north-east Belgium after the disappearance on 17 May of Jurgen Conings, who was on an anti-terrorism watchlist, had threatened a senior virologist involved in the country’s Covid-19 programme and had hoarded heavy weaponry.

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Marine Le Pen poised to make gains in France’s regional elections

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Sunday’s poll could help far right step further towards political mainstream ahead of 2022 presidential elections

France is voting in the first round of regional elections that could see Marine Le Pen‘s far-right party make gains and step further into the political mainstream.

In Sunday’s election, new assemblies will be elected for mainland France’s 13 regions and 96 departments, with Le Pen‘s National Rally (RN) tipped to win at least one region for the first time in what would be a major coup.

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Five construction workers die in Belgium school collapse

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Nine other people were injured when the Antwerp school, which was still under construction, collapsed

Five building workers have been confirmed dead after a school construction site partially collapsed in the Belgian city of Antwerp.

The last two bodies were pulled out the rubble on Saturday afternoon, Antwerp’s fire department said, meaning that all the missing victims were now accounted for.

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‘It was war’: partygoer loses hand amid clashes with French police at illegal rave

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Authorities accuse partygoers of throwing Molotov cocktails, metal balls and bits of breeze blocks at officers, who fired teargas to break up party

French police clashed for hours with partygoers at a 1,500-strong illegal rave over the weekend, with one partygoer losing a hand and five officers injured.

Local official Emmanuel Berthier said partygoers threw “Molotov cocktails, metal balls and bits of breeze blocks” at officers during “very violent clashes” in western France.

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The ‘human rights’ sex trade case that will harm women

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A European court judgment this week could reverse laws that protect the vulnerable and abused

A case to be heard in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg this week could have disastrous consequences for those campaigning to eradicate prostitution.

The hearing is the first step in determining whether France’s laws on prostitution – which criminalise paying for sex – are constitutional, or whether they contravene the human rights of self-titled “sex workers”.

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EU founding father Robert Schuman moves a step closer to sainthood

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Pope Francis gives ‘venerable’ status to post-war French statesman and supporter of European unity

Robert Schuman, a French statesman who was an early advocate for the bloc that evolved into the European Union, has moved ahead on the Catholic church’s path toward possible sainthood.

The Vatican said Pope Francis on Saturday approved a decree declaring the “heroic virtues″ of Schuman, a former prime minister and finance minister after the second world war. In 1950, as foreign minister, he developed a plan to promote European economic unity in hopes of furthering peace.

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Poland: thousands turn out for Warsaw Pride march

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Sea of rainbow flags in the capital as campaigners warn against rising tide of homophobia

Thousands marched through central Warsaw on Saturday in an “equality parade”, amid what campaigners say has been a rising tide of homophobia in Poland in recent years.

LGBT rights have become a central part of a wider struggle in the country between liberals, who stress the need for a more tolerant and inclusive society, and religious conservatives, who denounce what they say is an attempt to subvert traditional values in the predominantly Catholic nation.

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‘It’s such a relief’: how Europe’s Covid vaccine rollout is catching up with UK

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More supplies and vaccination centres have put France, Italy and Germany back on track in battle against coronavirus

On Friday morning, Leyla Çelik woke up with butterflies in her stomach. For weeks, the 22-year-old student at Berlin’s Freie Universität had tried in vain to get an appointment for her first Covid-19 vaccine shot so she could volunteer as a polling station administrator at federal elections in September. “I’d basically given up hope.”

But last week her university had suddenly got in touch via email, offering her a chance to get a first dose of Moderna vaccine on campus, and within a few days. By 9am on Friday, the anxiety has turned into euphoria: “It’s such a relief,” said the native Berliner, nursing her achey shoulder at Freie’s biology institute, converted into a vaccine delivery point as of this week. “At last I can catch a train or a bus without feeling anxious.”

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