Threat of action follows UK moves to unilaterally delay implementation of part of deal relating to Northern Ireland
Brussels has warned it will launch legal action “very soon” following a move by the UK to unilaterally delay implementation of part of the Brexit deal relating to Northern Ireland.
The European commission vice-president, Maroš Šefčovič, said the announcement by the government on Wednesday had come as a “very negative surprise”.
Continue reading...Visitors would need vaccine approved by EMA administered at least seven days before travel
Cyprus will allow British tourists who have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 into the country without restrictions from 1 May, a tourism minister has said.
British visitors are the largest market for the country’s tourism industry, which has suffered during the coronavirus pandemic. Arrivals and earnings from the sector, which represents about 13% of the Cypriot economy, plunged on average 85% in 2020.
Continue reading...Staff of charities including Save the Children and MSF among dozens facing sentences of up to 20 years over humanitarian work
After an investigation lasting almost four years, Italian prosecutors have charged dozens of rescuers, from charities including Save the Children and Médecins Sans Frontières, who were accused of collaborating with people smugglers after saving thousands of people from drowning in the Mediterranean.
Investigators in Trapani, Sicily, formally closed the inquiry on Monday and charged more than 20 people, including boat captains, heads of mission and legal representatives, with crimes carrying sentences of up to 20 years.
Continue reading...In 2019 Thierry Baudet looked like a plausible contender for power. Now, as the Netherlands heads for the polls, he’s reduced to mimicking Trump
On 20 March 2019, Thierry Baudet provided Dutch television viewers with two surprises. The first was news of his landslide victory in that day’s senate elections. Baudet’s far-right Forum for Democracy (FvD) was a newcomer in parliament, holding just two seats out of 150 in the lower house. But that day, from scratch, Forum gained 12 of the senate’s 75 seats, putting it on a par with the governing liberal party (the VVD) led by prime minister Mark Rutte.
The second surprise was Baudet’s victory speech. “The owl of Athena spreads her wings as evening falls,” he started, and across the country, jaws dropped and drinks were spilled. The Netherlands is not a country noted for oratory. Our politicians would rather downplay their intellectual prowess than borrow from Greek mythology.
Continue reading...Loyalist Communities Council warns of ‘strength of feeling’ over border checks but says protests should stay peaceful
A body that claims to represent loyalist paramilitary organisations has told Boris Johnson the outlawed groups are withdrawing support for Northern Ireland’s historic peace agreement.
The Loyalist Communities Council (LCC) said the groups were temporarily withdrawing their backing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement amid mounting concerns about the contentious Northern Ireland Protocol governing Irish Sea trade post-Brexit.
Continue reading...Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary depicts a Middle East emerging from trauma, but it is self-conscious at times
Documentary film-maker Gianfranco Rosi has created a very characteristic cine-poem of sadness, about the Middle East as it emerges from Isis terror, but remaining scarred by the intervention of western powers who had promised so much. It’s an intensely considered curation of scenes: glimpses, perhaps, into a collective mind or soul. Rosi has assembled this from years of filming in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. It’s similar in its observational procedures to films such as Sacro GRA, his 2013 study of those who live on the periphery of Rome, near the “GRA” ring road, and also his masterly Fire at Sea from 2016, about the lives of desperate migrants who arrive in Lampedusa, Sicily, and the locals who are coming to terms with them.
The title means “night” or “of the night”, and many scenes seem to be happening at nightfall (or possibly at daybreak), particularly the opening, extended sequence of soldiers drilling, jogging around in a circle. There are many striking moments and beautifully realised images and vignettes here, a rhetorical structure that is perhaps inspired by the play that, in one scene, psychiatric patients are shown rehearsing about the lives of people in Iraq. But I worried a little that Rosi’s techniques are becoming a self-conscious mannerism, and furthermore that the film is a little too diffuse, taking in four different places and effectively homogenising them.
Anecdotal evidence suggests Muslims over-represented in ICUs, but Germany has no official data
German doctors are reportedly concerned about the large proportion of people from minority ethnic backgrounds among coronavirus patients in intensive care, citing a lack of proper communication with Muslim communities in particular about the dangers of the disease.
Lothar Wieler, the head of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s disease control agency, confirmed that the issue was discussed with senior medical consultants last month, though he stressed the meeting was informal.
Continue reading...The 90-year-old Irish writer will be named commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres on Sunday
Edna O’Brien is to receive France’s highest cultural distinction, and be named commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres this week.
Related: Edna O’Brien on turning 90: ‘I can’t pretend that I haven’t made mistakes’
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.”
Continue reading...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”.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.”
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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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