Category Archives: Europe

Hungary’s Fidesz party to leave European parliament centre-right group

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Rightwing party’s move comes after European People’s party changed its internal rules on excluding members

Hungary’s ruling rightwing Fidesz party has said it will leave the main centre-right political grouping in the European parliament after the European People’s party (EPP) voted to change its internal laws on excluding members.

The EPP’s 180 members, many of whom have campaigned for the expulsion of Fidesz, which they accuse of weakening Hungary’s democracy and curbing media and other freedoms, voted by 148 to 28 in favour of the new rules, with four abstentions.

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How elimination versus suppression became Covid’s cold war | Laura Spinney

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Getting rid of the virus completely now seems an impossible project. But there are powerful arguments in its favour

A year ago, when the World Health Organization published a report showing that China had shut down a highly contagious virus in a city of 11 million people, epidemiologist Michael Baker assumed that the international body would advise the rest of the world to follow China’s example. When to his amazement it didn’t, he decided that New Zealand (population 5 million) should go its own way, and started lobbying the government to pursue an elimination strategy.

He found some unexpected allies in New Zealand’s billionaires who, hearing what he was proposing, got on the phone to cabinet ministers too. On 23 March, New Zealand shut down and seven weeks later, its citizens emerged into a virus-free country. Baker, who estimates that the move saved about 8,000 lives, later asked the billionaires why they backed him: “They said, ‘We didn’t get filthy rich by not being good at assessing and managing risk.’ They were in it for the long haul.”

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Nicolas Sarkozy attacks ‘shockingly unjust’ corruption conviction

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Ex-French president vows to take case to European court of human rights if appeal does not succeed

Days after his conviction for corruption and influence peddling, Nicolas Sarkozy has said he will take the battle to clear his name to the European court of human rights if he does not win on appeal.

The former French president described a Paris court’s verdict on Monday and the three-year prison sentence he was given (two years suspended) as “profoundly and shockingly unjust”.

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Galician noir: how a rainy corner of Spain spawned a new TV genre

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Spanish dramas such as Money Heist have been taking the world by storm in recent years. But why are film-makers now flooding to the country’s north-west to make their shows?

Rosa Vargas’s arrival in a small town in north-western Spain to investigate the disappearance of a young girl marked an unlikely milestone. Vargas is the fictional police detective in O sabor das margaridas (Bitter Daisies), which, in 2019 became the first series in Galician, a language spoken by fewer than 2.5 million people, to be broadcast by Netflix. The series became one of the top 10 most-watched non-English language shows in the UK and Ireland just a month after its international release.

A decade after Nordic noir captured the attention of international TV audiences, a TV genre some are calling “Galician noir” is emerging from the rainy corner of Spain. HBO made its debut in the Galician language last year with a Spanish-Portuguese miniseries Auga seca (Dry Water), a murder mystery set in the port city of Vigo, and was soon followed by the Galician-produced police thriller La unidad (The Unit) on the Spanish subscription platform Movistar+. More recently, El desorden que dejas (The Mess You Leave Behind), based on a novel by the screenwriter Carlos Montero, premiered on Netflix in December.

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Cypriot church calls for ‘devil’ Eurovision song to be scrapped

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Orthodox church says entry ‘praises the fatalistic submission of humans to the devil’s authority’

The Orthodox Church of Cyprus has called for the withdrawal of the country’s controversial entry into this year’s Eurovision song contest titled “El Diablo,” charging that the song makes an international mockery of country’s moral foundations by advocating “our surrender to the devil and promoting his worship”.

The Holy Synod, the church’s highest decision-making body, said in a statement that the song “essentially praises the fatalistic submission of humans to the devil’s authority” and urged the state broadcaster to replace it with one that “expresses our history, culture, traditions and our claims.”

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Family of trailblazing female Spanish mayor hail DNA match to remains

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Discovery after cemetery exhumation throws spotlight on legacy of María Domínguez Remón

More than eight decades after she was murdered, the remains of Spain’s first female mayor of the second republic have been identified, wrapping up a months-long investigation that has helped to cast a spotlight on María Domínguez Remón’s trailblazing legacy.

An exhumation, carried out earlier this year in the small town of Fuendejalón, Aragón, ignited hopes that the remains of Domínguez had been found. A handful of clues hinted that the remains were those of the feminist and rights activist; the location dovetailed with reports of where she was believed to be, the skull bore a hole where it had been punctured by a bullet and lying with the remains was a small brown comb like that worn by Domínguez.

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Covid: Germany and France under pressure to shift Oxford vaccine

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Both countries urged to take action to avoid pile-up of unused AstraZeneca vaccine doses

Authorities in Germany and France are under pressure to come up with creative solutions to shift the AstraZeneca vaccine at higher speed in order to avoid a pile-up of unused doses over the coming weeks.

On Monday, France’s medical regulator reversed its advice not to use the AstraZeneca jab on over-65s, and Germany’s vaccination committee is coming under increasing pressure to follow suit or even scrap prioritisation altogether.

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Weekend lockdown in Paris would be ‘inhumane’, says mayor

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Anne Hidalgo condemns plans to shut city and suburbs to stem spread of coronavirus

The mayor of Paris has described as “inhumane” plans to force the city into weekend lockdowns to combat the continuing spread of Covid-19.

Anne Hidalgo has vehemently opposed government plans to shut down the city and its suburbs at the end of the week, saying its residents, most of whom live in apartments with no outside space, “need a horizon” and have to be able to escape to outside spaces such as parks, gardens and riverside areas.

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City firms made plans in Brexit run-up to move assets worth £100bn to EU – survey

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Data from EY highlights last-minute transfers in order to hold on to European business

City firms revealed in the final months of 2020 that they planned to shift nearly £100bn in assets to the EU, taking the total value of assets lost to the bloc since the Brexit vote to £1.3 trillion, according to a new survey.

The data from consulting group EY pointed to a last-minute push by firms before 31 December after the UK-EU trade deal did not offer concessions for the UK’s dominant financial services sector. It forced companies to move staff and assets to the continent in order to continue serving EU customers.

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Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy sentenced to jail for corruption

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Sarkozy found guilty of corruption and influence peddling but is unlikely to spend time in prison

When the verdict came, it reduced the Paris court to a stunned silence: Nicolas Sarkozy was guilty of corruption and influence peddling, and sentenced to three years in prison, two of them suspended.

France’s president from 2007 to 2012 had played an “active role” in forging a “corruption pact” with his lawyer and a senior magistrate to obtain information on a separate investigation into political donations, the leading judge declared, and there was “serious and concurring evidence” of collaboration between the three men to break the law.

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‘There is no perfect crime’: inside the real French CSI

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A new police science unit in France is deploying groundbreaking forensics and believes DNA will soon allow it to put faces on suspects

Imagine a crime scene. The body of a man in a red sweatshirt and jeans lies dead on the living room floor of an apartment, a revolver near his right hand. There is a blood stain on the blue patterned rug and a bullet hole in the ceiling. On a low table sit an almost empty bottle of whisky and two glasses. The television is off.

If this were an episode of the French TV crime drama Engrenages (Spiral) which ran for eight seasons, or the more recent Netflix hit Lupin, the mystery would have been solved and the killer caught before the screen credits rolled.

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‘Shocked by the uproar’: Amanda Gorman’s white translator quits

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International Booker winner Marieke Lucas Rijneveld will not translate inaugural poet’s work into Dutch after anger that a Black writer was not hired

The acclaimed author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has pulled out of translating Amanda Gorman’s poetry into Dutch, after their publisher was criticised for picking a writer for the role who was not also Black.

Related: 'My family are too frightened to read my book': meet Europe's most exciting authors

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Belgium considers U-turn on Oxford Covid vaccine for over-55s

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Several European countries opted not to give the jab to older age groups due to lack of data

People over the age of 55 in Belgium could be given the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, as the government seeks to “reset” its heavily criticised vaccination programme.

Belgium joined Germany, France, Poland and Italy last month in only giving the vaccine to younger groups due to a comparative lack of data on its efficacy in the older age ranges in the Oxford/AstraZeneca clinical trials.

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Like Pablo Hasél, I faced jail for my rap lyrics – but the worst censorship is self-censorship | Valtònyc

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The rapper’s arrest shows Spain has a problem with freedom of ideology. But people shouldn’t be scared to write songs that stand up to power

The arrest of Pablo Hasél this month, a Spanish rapper – like me – who is accused of glorifying terrorism and insulting the monarchy in his lyrics, didn’t surprise me. When I was 18, I wrote a song about the Spanish king, the police arrested me and I was sentenced to three and a half years in jail. The day they came to take me to prison, I fled to Belgium and have been here ever since, despite the best efforts of Spain to have me extradited. It seemed like a joke – almost four years in jail for a song. But it wasn’t: there are 18 rappers in Spain facing jail for similar charges.

Related: Angry words: rapper's jailing exposes Spain's free speech faultlines

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‘Help and you are a criminal’: the fight to defend refugee rights at Europe’s borders

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As illegal, and often violent, pushbacks of asylum seekers continue – human rights groups also report growing hostility

At the offices of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights group in Budapest, András Léderer and his colleagues have a map on which they track every asylum seeker – man, woman or child – who has been physically pushed back by police from the Hungarian border and into the forests of Serbia.

The pushbacks are illegal under international law. Yet it is Léderer and his fellow human rights activists who could face arrest and a jail sentence if they went to the border to witness what is happening there.

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Covid has ‘taken wind out of Dutch politics’, analysts say as elections loom

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Mark Rutte enters final leg of race in dominant position despite ‘difficult phase’ of pandemic

Coronavirus has “completely taken the wind out of Dutch politics”, analysts say, predicting little change in the makeup of the coalition government after March elections as the prime minister, Mark Rutte, begins cautiously easing restrictions.

Despite three nights of rioting and 400 arrests after a night-time curfew, the first since the second world war, was imposed in January, and one of Europe’s slowest vaccine rollouts, Rutte enters the last two weeks of the election race in a dominant position.

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Denmark’s climate policies ‘insufficient’ to meet 2030 target

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Report says country set to cut carbon emissions by 54% compared with 1990 levels, not 70% as planned

The Danish government’s efforts towards meeting the country’s ambitious target of reducing emissions by 70% by 2030 have been judged “insufficient” by the body tasked with monitoring its progress, with measures so far announced only likely to take it a third of the way.

In its first annual status report, the Danish Council on Climate Change said new laws, inter-party agreements and initiatives announced since the country’s climate law came into effect last June would reduce emissions by the equivalent of 7.2m tonnes of CO2 by 2030, which is only enough to reduce Denmark’s emissions by 54% compared with 1990 levels.

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Will the ‘Sistine Chapel’ of pelota bounce back as a centre of Spanish culture?

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Campaigners call for historic sports venue in Madrid to become a world heritage site after its €38m restoration

Beneath a pale-blue late-winter sky, and behind an elegant but unassuming facade, one of Madrid’s great unsung survivors sits waiting, once more, for news of the latest in a long and improbable series of metamorphoses.

Since its inauguration 127 years ago, the Frontón Beti-Jai, built at the height of the Spanish capital’s love affair with the Basque game of pelota, has echoed with the crack of leather-stitched balls, with cheers, screams, the thrill of invention, the gunning of thirsty American engines and, most recently, the chirping of the birds who nested in its almost terminal decay.

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Germany set to give AstraZeneca jab to older people

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Regulator concedes process had ‘somehow gone wrong’ and could soon approve vaccine

Germany could soon authorise the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine for seniors after the head of the country’s vaccination committee said his body’s advice to give the Oxford-developed vaccine only to those under 65 had “somehow gone wrong”.

Unlike the European Medicines Agency or Britain’s MHRA, Germany’s Standing Committee on Vaccination (Stiko) last month recommended against the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine on seniors, citing a lack of conclusive trial data to prove its efficacy in that age group.

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Cattle stranded on ship in Spain must be destroyed, say vets

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Spanish officials recommend 864 cows that have been at sea for two months are no longer fit for transport

More than 850 cows that have spent months aboard a ship wandering across the Mediterranean are no longer fit for transport any more and should be killed, according to a confidential report by Spanish government veterinarians.

The cows have been kept in what an animal rights activist called “hellish” conditions on the Karim Allah, which docked in the south-eastern Spanish port of Cartagena on Thursday after struggling for two months to find a buyer for the cattle.

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