Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Mosque beset by difficulties finally to allow in worshippers thanks to relaxation of Greece’s Covid restrictions
Christmas has been greeted with enthusiasm by Muslim worshippers in Athens after the modern Greek capital’s first official mosque – forced to close only days after its inauguration in November – was told it could reopen for the holiday.
Relaxation of a national lockdown to enable Greek Orthodox faithful to attend mass on Christmas Day means the mosque will also be able to operate.
Boris Johnson is confident he can sell the trade deal to Brexiters, according to the FT (paywall).
Sebastian Payne and George Parker report that Downing Street has been preparing the ground for weeks with the ERG, ensuring that senior backbenchers were aware of the shape of things to come and compromises being made.
Senior members of the group have already welcomed Johnson’s imminent deal as the “Christmas Eve Agreement”, a reference to the 1998 Belfast Good Friday Agreement that secured peace in Northern Ireland.
Indications from senior figures within the ERG suggest that many of its members will accept the compromises negotiated by Johnson and Lord Frost.
If they want help from the party to stay in parliament, then they’ll back the deal.
In case you’re just joining us, the final stage of the negotiations for a post-Brexit trade deal has been delayed after it emerged that the European commission was using out-of-date figures to calculate the reduction in the amount of fish that member states can catch in British waters after 1 January.
A deal was due to be announced early this morning but the announcement had to be postponed when officials noticed a discrepancy between two sets of fishing figures and realised that the numbers used in the negotiation appeared to be out of date.
People urged to turn off TVs and make noise during address, after rough year for royal family
Anti-monarchists in Spain are calling for noisy protests to drown out the king’s annual Christmas speech, urging people to turn off their televisions, bang on pots and pans or blast republican tunes, as the Spanish royal family seeks to turn the page on one of its most tumultuous years in recent history.
“There will be all sorts of protests by various collectives,” José Manuel García, of the republican group Encuentro Estatal por la República, told the news site Diario Público.
A team of French firefighters has been sent to Dover with 10,000 coronavirus tests for lorry drivers under a renewed Franco-British mission to let hauliers cross the Channel by Christmas Day as it emerged that fewer than 100 of the thousands of waiting vehicles were embarked on Wednesday.
France’s ambassador to the UK, Catherine Colonna, said the two countries were “neighbours, partners, allies and (yes) friends” and that 26 firefighters had brought thousands of rapid-turnaround tests to the port on Christmas Eve.
Italian Roberto Trignani is known for ‘awake surgery’ and other unorthodox methods
Playing the violin, watching cartoons and doing crosswords: these are just some of the activities patients have performed while having brain surgery under Roberto Trignani.
Trignani, the head of neurosurgery at Riuniti hospital in Ancona, Italy, was already known for his “awake surgery” techniques, which he has used roughly 70 times in the last few years. But he broke new ground in June this year when a 60-year-old woman prepared stuffed olives as he removed a tumour from her left temporal lobe.
Desperate relatives in Britain plead with Home Office for flexibility as paperwork holdups delay family reunions while deadline looms
The Home Office has said it will not allow a group of stranded refugee children to join their families in the UK if their cases do not make it through the Greek asylum system by 31 December when the EU family reunification programme comes to an end.
Around 20 children who are eligible to join their relatives in the UK under the current family reunification scheme are still waiting for their cases to be completed in Greece, before the UK government ends the programme when it leaves the EU on the 31st December.
Britain and Europe still seeking last-minute advantage in final stages of negotiations
A post-Brexit trade and security treaty with the European Union is within “touching distance”, Downing Street said on Wednesday night as Boris Johnson prepared to overcome final disagreements to unveil a hard-fought Christmas Eve deal.
The prime minister is expected to seal the deal following a final call with the European commission president Ursula von der Leyen – but the two sides were battling deep into the night to gain a last-minute advantage.
Lipa facility had been criticised by rights groups for failing to provide basic services
A fast-moving fire has destroyed a migrant camp in Bosnia strongly criticised by rights groups as inadequate due to its lack of resources.
The blaze broke out at the Lipa camp, close to the border with Croatia, on the same day the International Organization for Migration (IOM) had declared the effective closure of the facility, saying Bosnian authorities had ignored its appeals to supply basic services.
Citizens are finally getting the urban patios and parks promised when the cramped medieval city was extended in the 1900s
At the turn of the 20th century, the Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerdà had a revolutionary idea for extending Barcelona beyond the cramped confines of its medieval walls. In the grid system of the extension he planned, each city block would be built around a large open space or patio, designed to be a park for residents.
When he began his work, the old city was hemmed in physically and psychologically, desperately overcrowded and disease-ridden, with frequent outbreaks of cholera and a lower life expectancy than London or Paris.
Shocking dossier of systematic violations of asylum seekers along the notorious ‘Balkan route’ compiled by watchdog groups
A 1,500-page “black book” documenting hundreds of illegal pushbacks against asylum seekers by authorities on Europe’s external borders was released last week and handed over to the EU commission.
Compiled by the watchdogorganisation Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN), the Black Book of Pushbacks is a collection of 892 group testimonies, detailing the experiences of 12,654 victims of human rights violations along the Balkan migration route, one of the most gruelling in the recent migrant crisis given the alleged violence of border police officers.
The European Union’s transport commissioner, Adina Valean has said that she is pleased stranded trucks are now moving “slowly across the Channel”, as restrictions between France and the UK were lifted.
The initial restrictions were imposed after the UK discovered a new variant of the Covid-19 virus, which, reportedly has a faster transmission rate.
Around 10.000 truck drivers are seeking to get back in the EU. Other thousands are already in the Dover area in their vehicles.
We worked hard these days to unblock a crisis between two European countries, France and the UK. We issued a communication appealing for proportional, non-discriminatory measures and the lift of any restrictions for transport workers.
I am pleased that at this moment, we have trucks slowly crossing the channel, and I want to thank UK authorities that they started testing the drivers at a capacity of 300 tests per hour.
Passengers from the UK disembarked from ferries in the port of Calais early on Wednesday after Britain and France agreed a deal to ease a travel ban imposed over the discovery of a new coronavirus variant.
The Cotes des Flandres ferry – the first ship to leave Dover after the restrictions were lifted – arrived at about 3.30am local time, followed shortly afterwards by P&O’s Spirit of France.
A 48-year-old man fired on officers trying to rescue a woman from a house in a hamlet near Saint-Just, according to a local report
Three gendarmes have been shot dead, and a fourth wounded, in central France, the country’s national police force has said. The shooting is believed to have started while officers were attending a domestic violence incident.
A 48-year-old man shot the officers on Tuesday night at an isolated hamlet near Saint-Just in the Puy-de-Dome region, after police tried to rescue a woman who had taken refuge in a house, according to news channel LCI.
The decision by France to close its borders to incoming freight traffic from the UK has caused chaos in Dover – the gateway to Europe – and roads leading to the port
Relatives of coronavirus victims in Italy are taking legal action against the prime minister, health minister and the president of the Lombardy region for alleged criminal negligence over their handling of the pandemic.
The group of 500 families will file their civil lawsuit on Wednesday with prosecutors in the Lombardy province of Bergamo, which was badly hit during the first wave of the pandemic. They claim the three leaders – Giuseppe Conte, Roberto Speranza and Attilio Fontana respectively – have contributed to Italy’s almost 70,000 Covid-19 deaths.
Opposition leader has a persecution complex and delusions of grandeur, says spokesman for Vladimir Putin
A Kremlin spokesman has accused the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny of having a “persecution complex” and of “comparing himself to Jesus”, in an extended and unusual attack indicative of anger over recent revelations about the FSB domestic intelligence service.
Last week, the investigative website Bellingcat published details of the eight FSB officers who allegedly poisoned Navalny in August. Then on Monday, Navalny released a recording of a bombshell telephone call in which he tricked an FSB officer into revealing details of the alleged plot, which apparently centred on the application of novichok to the “inner seams” of Navalny’s boxer shorts.
The chief executive of the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech said he was confident its coronavirus vaccine worked against the new UK variant, but that further studies were needed to be certain. 'Scientifically, it is highly likely that the immune response by this vaccine also can deal with the new virus variants,' Uğur Şahin said. If the vaccine needs to be adjusted for the new variant, the company could do that in about six weeks, he added
Health impact is unknown but scientists say particles may cause long-term damage to foetuses
Microplastic particles have been revealed in the placentas of unborn babies for the first time, which the researchers said was “a matter of great concern”.
The health impact of microplastics in the body is as yet unknown. But the scientists said they could carry chemicals that could cause long-term damage or upset the foetus’s developing immune system. The particles are likely to have been consumed or breathed in by the mothers.
France and Denmark thought to be most cautious about budging from current demands on fish caught in British waters
EU member states with the largest fishing fleets are being asked by Ursula von der Leyen’s senior team to rethink their “final offer” after Downing Street made a significant move to break the Brexit deadlock.
France and Denmark are understood to be the most cautious about making a counter-proposal, budging from their current demand that their vessels lose only 25% by value of the fish they catch in British waters.