Category Archives: Europe

Von der Leyen: big tech firms need to be reined in despite Trump’s exit

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Internet giants that spread hate speech and conspiracy theories should face ‘democratic limits’, says European commission president

The end of Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House was celebrated by the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday, as she warned that the former US president’s rise highlighted the need to confront the internet giants who helped him spread “conspiracy theories and fake news”.

The European commission president spoke of her relief at Trump’s departure, but warned that the outgoing leader’s movement still existed, and that the digital platforms used to spread hate needed to be tackled.

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Hungary orders LGBT publisher to print disclaimers on children’s book

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Fairytale anthology Wonderland Is for Everyone must now carry warning that its stories contain ‘behaviour inconsistent with traditional gender roles’

Hungary’s government, which has made hostility to LGBT people a central part of its rightwing agenda, on Tuesday ordered a publisher to print disclaimers identifying books containing “behaviour inconsistent with traditional gender roles”.

The government said the action was needed to protect consumers, after Labrisz, an association for lesbian, bisexual and trans women, published a fairytale anthology titled Wonderland Is for Everyone, which included some stories with LGBT themes.

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Facebook under pressure to resume scanning messages for child abuse in EU

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Half of referrals for child sexual abuse material could be falling under the radar after changes to EU e-privacy directive

The children’s charity NSPCC has called on Facebook to resume a programme that scanned private messages for indications of child abuse, with new data suggesting that almost half of referrals for child sexual abuse material are now falling below the radar.

Recent changes to the European commission’s e-privacy directive, which are being finalised, require messaging services to follow strict new restrictions on the privacy of message data. Facebook blamed that directive for shutting down the child protection operation, but the children’s charity says Facebook has gone too far in reading the law as banning it entirely.

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Madrid explosion: buildings destroyed and casualties reported in blast – video

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Spanish emergency services say rescue teams, firefighters and police are working in a central area of Madrid after an explosion.

Footage shared on social media showed a tower of smoke ascending from a building and rubble strewn on the street.

Spanish media reports said the blast took place in a building near a nursing home and a school. There have been reports of casualties 

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European leaders hail ‘new dawn’ for ties with US under Biden

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Leaders say Europe again has a friend in the White House but differences with US will not disappear

European leaders have voiced relief at Joe Biden’s inauguration, hailing a “new dawn” for Europe and the US, but warned that the world has changed after four years of Donald Trump’s presidency and that transatlantic ties will be different in future.

“This new dawn in America is the moment we’ve been awaiting for so long,” Ursula von der Leyen, the European commission president, told MEPs. “Once again, after four long years, Europe has a friend in the White House.”

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Sweden to build reindeer bridges over roads and railways

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‘Renoducts’ will help animals who have to roam further for food due to global heating

Sweden is to build up to a dozen bridges so reindeer can safely cross railway lines and major roads in the north of the country as global heating forces them to roam further afield in search of food.

State broadcaster SVT said the transport authority aimed to start work on the first of the new bridges, named “renoducts”, a portmanteau from ren (reindeer) and viaduct, later this year near the eastern city of Umea.

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Coronavirus live news: Germany extends partial lockdown as UK suffers record daily Covid deaths

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Germany extends lockdown to 14 February and tightens restrictions; US deaths pass 400,000; US suffers record daily deaths

Covid-19 is unlikely to ever die out, even with vaccination efforts, but it could become more transmissible and less deadly, New Zealand’s director general of health has warned.

“If you think about influenza, which was first recorded in 1172 I think, in Europe … these viruses don’t tend to die out … They change over time and in fact what we are seeing with these new variants with the Covid-19 virus is that they tend become more transmissible and less deadly over time,” Dr Ashley Bloomfield told the AM Show on Wednesday.

Related: Covid unlikely to die out, says New Zealand health chief Ashley Bloomfield

If you fancy a break from the bad news, why not spend a few minutes thinking about sphinx moths (also known as hawk moths):

Related: The nature of the sphinx moth: 'it uses its big-ass tongue to get this guy pollinated' | Helen Sullivan

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Coronavirus live: Spain reports record new cases; Italy may take legal action over Pfizer vaccine delivery delays

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Spain records 41,576 new cases; Italy considers legal action over Pfizer vaccine delivery delays; France warns against wearing home-made masks

Spain logged another record number of new infections on Wednesday afternoon, recording 41,576 new cases in the preceding 24 hours and bringing the country’s total caseload to 2,412,318. It also recorded 464 deaths.

The new record came five days after the previous single-day high of 40,197 new cases.

Health authorities in Madrid have started mass testing hundreds of young people for Covid-19 at universities in a bid to detect asymptomatic carriers.

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Giuseppe Conte wins confidence vote in Italy’s senate by slim margin

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Prime minister faces leading an even more unstable coalition after exit of Matteo Renzi’s party

Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, has managed to cling to power, but he will plough ahead with an even more fragile government as the country battles to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic and recession.

Conte, who has led two different administrations since 2018, was supported by 156 lawmakers in the senate on Tuesday, with 140 voting against and 16 abstaining. Conte also won a vote of confidence in the lower house on Monday.

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Raw, brave, wild and honest: why Germany is Europe’s greatest artistic nation

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Germany became a unified state 150 years ago this week – and no other country has produced such original, provocative and powerful art since, from Richter to Klee, from Dix to Höch

Situated on the edge of the Alps, Neuschwanstein Castle may not look like the birthplace of modern art. Best seen from a perilously crowded footbridge across a vertiginous gorge, it floats in misty rains, a cloudy dream of white spires and battlements. Yet this 19th-century colossus is an architectural homage to one man: a composer who inspired the avant garde to make the leap to modernism.

Richard Wagner’s music so enflamed King Ludwig II of Bavaria, he built this magnificent medieval vision in honour of the composer. But, in artists across Europe, Wagner’s musical might released much more futuristic impulses. The abstract leitmotifs and unearthly symbolism of his operas fascinated artists from Aubrey Beardsley to Paul Cézanne. The impressionists, too, were entranced: Renoir travelled to Palermo, Sicily, to portray Wagner when he was composing Parsifal.

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Even in a Moscow jail, Alexei Navalny is dangerous to Putin

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Analysis: release of investigation into Putin’s wealth shows opposition leader is still determined to expose Russian president

For more than a decade, Vladimir Putin has refused to say Alexei Navalny’s name in public, referring to him as “that gentleman”, or more recently, the “patient”, a reference to his suspected poisoning by FSB agents.

In the logic of politics, Putin is simply trying not to give the Russian opposition leader free advertising. But his linguistic game also points to a rivalry that has become deeply personal, stoked by a decade of attacks against friends and family, and made urgent by the understanding that Navalny will not back down despite the threat of death by poisoning or prison.

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Police find stolen Leonardo copy museum did not know was missing

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Museum shut due to coronavirus was unaware that 500-year-old Salvator Mundi had been missing

Italian police has found a 500-year-old copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in a Naples flat and returned it to a museum that had no idea it had been stolen.

Officers said late Monday they had arrested the 36-year-old owner of the flat on suspicion of receiving stolen goods, after the painting was discovered in his bedroom cupboard.

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Europe can only fix its relationship with Africa if it exorcises its colonial ghosts | Shada Islam

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Paternalism and racism must be tackled if the EU is to rebuild trust with a young, economically dynamic continent

Black Lives Matter protests last summer sparked an uncomfortable reckoning for many European nations with a legacy of slavery and colonialism.

Excavating this dark history via revised school curriculums and initiatives such as Black History Month is difficult. But it is badly needed, and not just to dispel the self-congratulatory and entirely false narratives about Europe’s “civilisational” past still being driven by nationalist and populist politicians.

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EU border force head faces calls to quit over allegations he ‘misled’ MEPs

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Frontex director Fabrice Leggeri accused over failure to appoint officers to protect people’s rights, with home affairs commissioner calling for ‘clarity’

The head of the EU’s border force is under growing pressure to stand down after being accused by the European commission of acting unlawfully and giving misleading evidence to MEPs.

The allegations against Fabrice Leggeri, the executive director of Frontex, relate to the agency’s failure to recruit any of the 40 officers it is obliged to employ to protect the rights of people crossing into Europe.

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EU’s Covid vaccination debacle is down to institutional inflexibility

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Supply delays underline there was no legal or economic justification for central planning

A storm is raging over the EU’s failure to have ordered more of the approved Covid-19 vaccines ahead of time. Stéphane Bancel, the chief executive of the US pharmaceutical company Moderna, which gained approval for its vaccine shortly after Pfizer/BioNTech, claims that the EU has relied too much on “vaccines from its own laboratories”.

Did the European commission prioritise supporting its own pharmaceutical industry over protecting human lives? In fact, matters are not as simple as that. Contrary to what Bancel wants us to believe, the EU has actually ordered too little of its own vaccine. After all, the vaccine that is being administered most widely across the west was developed by a German company, BioNTech, and thus comes from the EU (though it was tested and partly produced in partnership with Pfizer in the US and with Fosun Pharma in China).

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French ex-PM Édouard Balladur goes on trial over alleged kickbacks

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Politician, 91, accused of financing failed 1995 presidential campaign with illegal kickbacks in ‘Karachi affair’

Former French prime minister Édouard Balladur will go on trial on Tuesday accused of financing his failed 1995 presidential campaign with illegal kickbacks from international arms deals.

The 91-year-old rightwing politician is the latest high-ranking French politician to find himself in the dock over the so-called Karachi affair that has poisoned the country’s political life for more than 25 years.

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Michelin awards star to vegan restaurant for the first time in France

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Restaurant ONA in the city of Ares rewarded after initially struggling to get funding to open its doors

A vegan restaurant in south-west France has won a Michelin star, the first for an establishment serving only animal-free products in France.

Claire Vallee runs the restaurant ONA – which stands for Origine Non Animale – in the city of Ares, near Bordeaux, which she launched in 2016 thanks to crowdfunding from supporters and a loan from a green bank.

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Greek president praises Sofia Bekatorou for reporting alleged sexual assault

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  • Olympic sailing gold medallist alleges assault occurred in 1998
  • Katerina Sakellaropoulou praises athlete’s ‘brave revelation’

Greece’s president, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, has praised the Olympic sailing champion Sofia Bekatorou for dissolving a potential “conspiracy of silence” by reporting a historic allegation of sexual assault by a sports official.

Bekatorou, who won a gold medal at the Athens Games in 2004, told the Greek edition of Marie Claire last month that she suffered the assault in 1998, when she was 21. Sakellaropoulou met Bekatorou on Monday and said her courage offered hope to other women in her situation.

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Belarus axed as host of ice hockey tournament over ‘security concerns’

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Sponsors of IIHF championships had begun to drop out after violent government crackdown on protests

The international ice hockey federation (IIHF) has said it will not hold this summer’s world championship in Belarus, amid concerns that it would be a propaganda coup for the country’s hockey-mad dictator, Alexander Lukashenko.

In a statement, the federation said it had made the decision “in the face of the growing safety and security concerns related to both the rising political unrest and Covid-19”. Minsk and the Latvian capital, Riga, were due to co-host the tournament in May and June.

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Seafood lorries travel to Westminster for protest against Brexit red tape

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Fishers ‘losing their livelihoods’ as delays hamper exports to the EU and trucks return empty

Fishing lorries from Scotland and Devon have descended on Westminster to stage a protest against the Brexit red tape they say is either delaying or ruining exports of their fresh shellfish to the EU.

Trucks with slogans including “Brexit carnage” and “Incompetent government destroying shellfish industry” parked metres from Downing Street on Monday, but they stopped short of carrying out their threat last week to dump fresh fish close to No 10.

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