Category Archives: Europe

‘They can see us in the dark’: migrants grapple with hi-tech fortress EU

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A powerful battery of drones, thermal cameras and heartbeat detectors are being deployed to exclude asylum seekers

Khaled has been playing “the game” for a year now. A former law student, he left Afghanistan in 2018, driven by precarious economic circumstances and fear for his security, as the Taliban were increasingly targeting Kabul.

But when he reached Europe, he realised the chances at winning the game were stacked against him. Getting to Europe’s borders was easy compared with actually crossing into the EU, he says, and there were more than physical obstacles preventing him from getting to Germany, where his uncle and girlfriend live.

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Gibraltar looks to post-Covid era as vaccine drive nears completion

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British overseas territory is positioning itself as real-time case study in relaxing restrictions

This month Gibraltar’s health minister snapped a photo from her first dinner out in months, showing two glasses of red wine sitting prominently on the table and a face mask cast off in the background. “Operation freedom begins,” tweeted Samantha Sacramento alongside the photo.

Operation Freedom, the name given to Gibraltar’s vaccination programme, is now closing in on its target: in the coming days the British overseas territory will become one of the first places in the world where every willing resident over the age of 16 has been fully vaccinated.

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Ursula von der Leyen backs authorisation mechanism for Covid vaccine exports – video

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Ursula von der Leyen has said the EU is transparent and open, and welcomes other countries to be transparent with their exports.

Speaking at a virtual summit, she said contracts should be fulfilled before exporting vaccines and should keep reciprocity, which needs to be transparent so supply chains stay intact.

The president of the European commission said companies that honour their contracts are important to the vaccine programme, both in Europe and worldwide.

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EU leaders back ‘global value chains’ instead of vaccine export bans

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Refusal to support measure despite Ursula von der Leyen highlighting 21m doses sent to UK

EU leaders backed “global value chains” rather than support Brussels in using new powers to block Covid jab exports to highly vaccinated countries, despite being told that 21m doses had been sent to the UK.

At a virtual summit, attended briefly by Joe Biden, the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, highlighted the large shipments sent over the Channel, amounting to two-thirds of the jabs given in the UK.

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France limits outdoor gatherings to six as Covid infections rise

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More areas of the country get mobility restrictions while Hungary and Poland face crises

Concern is mounting among health experts that France is not doing enough to curb a rise in coronavirus infections, particularly among younger people, as a third wave fuelled by the B117 variant first detected in the UK accelerates across Europe.

Announcing 45,000 new Covid-19 cases in the past 24 hours, the French health minister, Olivier Véran, on Thursday banned outdoor gatherings of more than six people and added three more départements, including the area around Lyon, to 16 already placed under tougher mobility restrictions.

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Cruise ships to be kept away from St Mark’s Square in Venice

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Italian government announces ‘temporary’ move to force ships to dock at industrial port instead

Cruise ships will no longer sail past St Mark’s Square in Venice and will be made to dock at the lagoon city’s industrial port, the Italian government has said.

The ministers for infrastructure, culture, tourism and the environment jointly took the decision “to protect a cultural and historical heritage that belongs not only to Italy but to the entire world”, a statement said on Thursday.

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UK diplomacy masks private fury in Covid vaccine row with EU

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Tussles over supplies could last months despite commitment in public to work together

Tussles with the EU over vaccine supplies could continue for months, UK government insiders fear, despite a joint statement in which both sides committed to working together.

From Boris Johnson’s phone calls to EU leaders to the foreign secretary Dominic Raab’s discreet lobbying on the fringes of this week’s Nato meeting, a significant amount of senior government time and energy is being invested in trying to resolve the issue.

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EU leaders push back against bloc’s plans to halt Covid vaccine export

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More sceptical member states hope ‘stick will never be used’ amid concerns over supply chain

EU leaders are likely to shy away from supporting the use of new powers to block Covid vaccine shipments to countries such as the UK with better jab coverage than the bloc, according to a draft statement ahead of a meeting of EU leaders today.

The European commission has increased its scope for blocking vaccine exports but disquiet among capitals is set to be reflected in a muted statement at the end of the virtual summit on Thursday evening.

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‘Just write STOP’: the teenager helping Polish women flee abuse

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Schoolgirl’s fake cosmetics site helps hundreds of women as domestic violence rises during Covid

In April 2020, weeks after Poland went into its first Covid-19 lockdown, Krysia Paszko, a 17-year-old high school pupil, watched a TV report about Europe’s surge in domestic violence cases, which had increased by up to 60% on 2019, according to the World Health Organization. Poland’s largest women’s rights centre, Centrum Praw Kobiet (CPK), had reported a 50% increase in calls to its domestic violence hotline in March.

Learning from the report that France had implemented a scheme in pharmacies that women could use to report domestic violence using the codewords “Mask 19”, Paszko had an idea. With help from a graphic designer friend, she created a Facebook page for a fictitious cosmetics company.

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Covid curfew and clock change threaten to call time on Spain’s drive-in cinemas

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Country’s oldest autocine is calling for exemption from 10pm rule so it can survive summer’s later sunsets

At 7.30 on Friday evening, Godzilla and King Kong are scheduled to converge on a large lot in eastern Spain to trade blows and bellows, rip fistfuls of fur and scales off each other and generally wreak CGI havoc for an appreciative, car-bound audience.

Their titanic sparring, however, could be short-lived. This weekend, the wading reptilian metaphor for atomic warfare and the conflicted, skyscraper-bothering ape could find themselves cowed by the setting sun, the changing of the clocks and the local coronavirus curfew.

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AstraZeneca plant investigated by Italian police at EU’s request

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Investigation is fresh sign of breakdown in relations between Brussels and Anglo-Swedish vaccine supplier

An AstraZeneca plant has come under investigation by the Italian police at the request of Brussels in a sign of the breakdown in relations between the Anglo-Swedish vaccine supplier and the EU.

Officers were sent into the facility in the town Anagni, east of Rome, on Saturday evening after the European commission contacted the Italian government with concerns.

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Germany eases citizenship rules for descendants of Nazi victims

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Measure helps close legal loopholes that led to many victims’ descendants having applications rejected

The German government has agreed a draft law to naturalise some descendants of Nazi victims who were previously denied citizenship.

Described by Berlin as a symbolic step, the measure helps close legal loopholes that had led to many victims’ descendants having their citizenship application rejected.

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The beluga whale who became famous: Aleksander Nordahl’s best photograph

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‘He was called Hvaldimir and he would play in front of crowds at Hammerfest harbour in Norway. One woman dropped her phone and he fetched it for her’

In April 2019, a beluga whale appeared alongside fishing boats off the coast of Norway. He was wearing a harness. A fisherman called Joar Hesten freed him, and saw the harness had stamped on it “equipment of St Petersburg”. The media went crazy, with talk of a “spy whale”, and the creature was named Hvaldimir, a combination of hval, the Norwegian word for whale, and Vladimir, a nod to Russia’s President Putin.

The whale became famous. There were Instagram videos of him playing in Hammerfest harbour in front of crowds. One woman dropped her phone in the water and the whale fetched it for her. He would bring up bones from the depths to show people, almost like little gifts. It became this huge moment on social media: everyone in the country fell in love with the whale. Even the hardcore fishing villages melted for Hvaldimir.

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UK singled out for failing to export Covid vaccines to EU

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European commission revising export authorisation mechanism ‘to ensure vaccination of EU’

Britain has been singled out for failing to export Covid vaccines to the EU as Brussels empowered officials to prohibit shipments of doses to countries with a better vaccination coverage than within the bloc.

Valdis Dombrovskis, a European commission vice-president, said the commission was revising its export authorisation mechanism in order to “ensure vaccination of our own population”.

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Vladimir Putin receives first dose of Russian-made Covid vaccine in private

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Russian president declines to have first dose in public after delaying jab for months

Vladimir Putin has received his first dose of a Russian-made coronavirus vaccine in private, his spokesman has confirmed, in an apparent effort to boost Russia’s fledgling vaccination drive after months of delaying his jab.

The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told news agencies late on Tuesday that the 68-year-old president had been vaccinated but did not specify which one of the three Russian-made vaccines was administered.

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Accused brothers seek pardon in Daphne Caruana Galizia case

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George and Alfred Degiorgio offer Maltese prosecutors details on other men they say were involved in killing

Two brothers accused of direct involvement in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia have asked for a presidential pardon in exchange for supplying state prosecutors with information on other men involved in the killing, including a former minister and a “middleman”.

George and Alfred Degiorgio, both arrested and accused of planting and triggering the car bomb that killed the investigative journalist in 2017, have sent two separate letters with formal requests to Malta’s president, George Vella.

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EU to widen criteria for possible Covid vaccine export bans

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Bloc expected to assess countries’ Covid vaccination coverage and record in facilitating exports to EU

The EU is expected to take into account the level of vaccination coverage in a country and its record in facilitating exports to the bloc when deciding on whether to prohibit individual vaccine shipments to the UK and elsewhere.

The revision of the export authorisation scheme, widening the criteria that will guide Brussels’ decisions on export requests, is due to be announced on Wednesday. EU leaders will then on Thursday discuss going further in controlling vaccine distribution when they meet by videoconference.

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‘No more shame’: the French women breaking the law to highlight femicide

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Alarming rates of violence have inspired a poster campaign that has spread beyond France to more than 15 countries


On a weekday evening, in between coronavirus lockdowns and curfews, Camille, Natacha and Cindy are out with a bright yellow plastic bucket of glue, two large brushes and a wad of A4 paper, each sheet covered with a single letter.

The women, all in their 20s, stop on the main road of this Paris suburb by the wall of what looks like a former bank.

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Thomas Bernhard was a ‘demon’, half-brother reveals in bestseller

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Memoir by Peter Fabjan, an acclaimed hit in Bernhard’s native Austria, describes a tormented man who flitted between ‘affection and icy contempt’

In public, he could be gregarious. His charm was legendary. For the great Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard, life was a kind of production. But as his half-brother Peter Fabjan remembers him in his new book, A Life Alongside Thomas Bernhard: A Report, published in German in January, there was another side to Bernhard. “My life was a life with a phantom – indeed a demon – at my side,” he writes.

A Top 10 bestseller in Austria, and labelled a must-read by Germany’s Die Welt, Fabjan’s book marks what would have been Bernhard’s 90th year, were it not for his premature death in 1989 at the age of 58. It has been widely acclaimed by critics; behind Fabjan’s sentences, Marc Reichwein wrote in Welt am Sonntag, one feels “the wounds of a sibling’s entire life”.

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Polish writer charged for calling president a ‘moron’

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Jakub Żulczyk faces possible prison term for insulting Andrzej Duda over his comments on Biden election win

A Polish writer faces a possible prison sentence for insulting President Andrzej Duda by calling him a “moron” over comments the latter made about Joe Biden’s US election victory.

Jakub Żulczyk, the screenwriter behind the popular TV series Blinded by the Lights and Belfer, said prosecutors had charged him under an article in the criminal code for insulting the head of state in a Facebook post.

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