Category Archives: Europe

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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Chariots of steel: Barcelona’s hidden army of scrap recyclers

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Thousands of migrants play a key role in collecting Catalonia’s waste but must live on the margins

They are everywhere and yet they are almost invisible, living below the social radar as they crisscross the city pushing supermarket trolleys piled with metal tubing, old microwaves and empty beer cans.

The chatarreros are Barcelona’s itinerant scrap-metal collectors, and there are thousands of them. Most are undocumented migrants and so there is no official census, but Federico Demaria, a social scientist at the University of Barcelona who is conducting a study of the informal recyclers in Catalonia, believes there are between 50,000 and 100,000 in the region. About half are from sub-Saharan Africa; the rest are from eastern Europe, elsewhere in Africa and Spain.

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Sturgeon welcomes ‘official, definitive, independent’ ruling she did not breach ministerial code – as it happened

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This live blog is now closed. For more on this story, you read the news report here

The army’s increased deployability and technological advantage will mean that greater effect can be delivered by fewer people. I’ve therefore taken the decision to reduce the size of the army from today’s current strength of 76,500 trade trained personnel to 72,500 by 2025.

The army has not been at its established strength of 82,000 since the middle of last decade.

Related: Coronavirus live news: Germany extends partial lockdown; Irish PM speaks out against vaccine export ban

Douglas Ross, the Scottish Conservative leader, has said that Nicola Sturgeon is not “free and clear”, despite being exonerated by the independent adviser on the ministerial code, because the Scottish parliament’s committee has not yet published its report on her. In a statement he said:

The first minister has been given a pass because it has been judged her ‘failure of recollection’ was ‘not deliberate’.

I respect Mr Hamilton and his judgment but we cannot agree with that assessment. Nicola Sturgeon did not suddenly turn forgetful.

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Italians urged to boycott Amazon to support day of strikes

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About 40,000 logistical workers hold national walkout over working conditions

Italian consumers were urged by unions to refrain from buying from Amazon for the day on Monday as about 40,000 of the online shopping giant’s logistical workers held a national strike over working conditions.

It is the first walkout in Italy to affect Amazon’s entire supply chain and involves warehouse and logistical hub workers as well as drivers provided by third-party services.

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Girl, two, dies after being rescued from migrant boat in Canaries

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Toddler from Mali has died in hospital after being resuscitated on a dock last week

A two-year-old girl from Mali who was rescued from a migrant boat and resuscitated on a dock in the Canary Islands last week has died in hospital, becoming the latest victim of the perilous Atlantic route from Africa to Europe.

The girl was one of 52 people travelling on a boat that had left the city of Dakhla in Western Sahara bound for the Spanish archipelago.

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‘We monitor its every breath’: inside Mount Etna’s war room

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In the city of Catania, at the foot of the volcano, scientists are trying to explain its recent unusual behaviour

When his phone rang at 3.22am last Wednesday, 50-year-old Giuseppe Salerno, the head of volcanologists at Catania’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), was already up after a thundering rumble had awoken many of the city’s inhabitants. The call came from the headquarters of the INGV where, a few seconds before that disturbance, seismic waves on one of the 40 monitors in the operations room seemed to jump off the screen. For the 14th time in less than a month, Mount Etna had sent another reminder that it is one of the world’s most active volcanoes.

Etna, 3,300 (10,800ft) metres above sea level, has been in explosive form in recent weeks, spewing incandescent magma and a copious shower of ash that has reached as far as Catania. Since 16 February, with fastidious precision, every 48 hours the volcano has put on a firework display with lava fountains reaching as high as 2,000 metres.

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‘Cooperative and rather active’: joy as pandas mate in French zoo

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Huan Huan, a female on loan from China at the Beauval zoo in France, was ‘put in contact’ eight times on Saturday with partner Yuan Zi

A couple of giant pandas in captivity engaged in a rare weekend of mating, although the hoped-for result, an even rarer panda offspring, is still too early to call, a French zoo has said.

Huan Huan, a female panda on loan from China at the Beauval zoo in central France, was “put in contact” eight times on Saturday with partner Yuan Zi, the zoo said on Sunday.

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Allowing summer holidays abroad risks another lockdown, Johnson is warned

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Sage experts are worried about overseas breaks leading to rise in vaccine-resistant variants in UK

Lifting the ban on foreign holidays in the coming months could risk another lockdown next winter, Boris Johnson is being warned, amid mounting alarm about a third wave of infections sweeping continental Europe.

Scientific experts and opposition politicians are urging the government to be extremely cautious before loosening travel restrictions, with their concerns about the prevalence of new variants of the virus overseas increasingly shared by Whitehall.

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EU’s southern states step up calls for ‘solidarity’ in managing mass migration

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Greece, Italy, Spain, Cyprus and Malta say burden has to be shared more justly with other EU partners

Europe’s southern states have stepped up calls for solidarity in managing mass migration to the bloc saying the burden has to be shared more justly with other EU partners.

Highlighting the deep divisions over the issue, politicians from countries along Europe’s Mediterranean rim said a proposed migration pact fell far short of resolving the crisis equitably.

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EU export ban would delay UK Covid vaccine drive by two months

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Exclusive: Halting distribution would hit Britain badly but not significantly help EU, analysis finds

Britain’s Covid vaccine programme faces a two-month delay in the event of an EU export ban, derailing the government’s plans to reopen the economy this summer, an analysis for the Guardian reveals.

A ban, due to be debated by leaders of the 27 EU member states on Thursday, would badly stall the UK vaccination effort, and would be likely to force the government to extend restrictions on people’s lives.

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Gerhard Richter gives Holocaust art to Berlin

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Germany’s greatest living painter donates 100 works, including his Birkenau series, to capital’s new museum

Fans of the German painter Gerhard Richter are expected to flock to Berlin to view 100 works that he has in effect donated in a long-term loan to a new museum of modern art. The works include a series of paintings addressing the Holocaust that he has vowed never to sell.

The donation by the 89-year-old, who is one of the world’s highest-priced living artists, is destined for the Museum der Moderne, which is under construction in the German capital.

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‘People are exhausted’: Germans grow weary of endless lockdown

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Berliners are impatient for vaccines and the country is poised to tighten restrictions as the third wave hits

Winters in Berlin are notoriously tough but this year has been like no other. “I’m really tired of it,” Ina Eggers, a teacher in the city, says. “Winter is always hard but now [with lockdown] we don’t have anything to do, so it’s been awful. ”

Germany is in the midst of a third wave of the pandemic, with case numbers increasing rapidly. On Saturday, the Robert Koch Institute reported 16,033 new Covid-19 infections within one day – 3,359 more than a week ago. In light of this, doctors are calling for an urgent tightening of lockdown rules to prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed for the third time.

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Iceland volcano: eruption under way on mountain near Reykjavik – video report

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A volcanic eruption began in south-west Iceland near the capital, Reykjavik, on Friday. More than 40,000 earthquakes have occurred on the peninsula in the past four weeks, a huge jump from the 1,000-3,000 registered each year since 2014. Unlike the eruption in 2010 of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which halted approximately 900,000 flights and forced hundreds of Icelanders from their homes, this eruption is not expected to spew much ash or smoke into the atmosphere

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Gerry Adams unveils Irish unity-themed Easter egg

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Limited supply of chocolate eggs launched by former Sinn Féin president only available in Belfast

Gerry Adams has launched his latest bid for Irish unity, this time in the form of a chocolate egg.

In a video shared on Twitter, the former Sinn Féin president unveiled a “very, very, very special package that we have put together at considerable expense” – a chocolate egg wrapped in a sheet of paper that says #Time4Unity.

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Iceland: aerial footage shows volcanic eruption near Reykjavik – video

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A long-dormant volcano in Fagradalsfjall, near Reykjavik in south-west Iceland, flared to life on Friday night, spilling lava down two sides in the area's first volcanic eruption in nearly 800 years. Initial aerial footage posted on social media by the Icelandic Meteorological Office showed a relatively small eruption so far, with two streams of lava running in opposite directions

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