Category Archives: Europe

France bans chokehold arrest as anger mounts over police brutality

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Interior minister says method will no longer be taught after outcry over George Floyd’s death in US puts focus back on police racism

France will ban the controversial chokehold used to detain suspects after the death in custody of George Floyd in the US intensified anger at the conduct of French police.

Floyd’s fatal arrest magnified attention on the 2016 death in French police custody of Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old black man, and renewed controversy over claims of racism and brutality within the force.

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Trump move to take US troops out of Germany ‘a dangerous game’

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UK politicians and military experts warn decision could hand advantage to Russia

British politicians and European military experts have warned that Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw 9,500 troops from Germany risks handing a strategic advantage to the Kremlin and undermining the postwar western military alliance.

It would also affect the United States’s ability to operate in the Middle East and Africa – although there is scepticism as to whether the notoriously fickle president will be able to carry out the threat before November’s election.

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‘We feel like prisoners’: the Moroccans stuck in Spanish enclaves during lockdown

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More than 500 Moroccans remain in limbo, far from home and with few resources to support themselves

On 14 March, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, ordered the country into Covid-19 lockdown, saying “extraordinary decisions” needed to be taken as the country struggled with a “health, social and economic crisis”.

The Moroccan authorities had taken their own extraordinary decision the day before, when they ordered the shutdown of the border crossings that connect the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla with the rest of the country. With the only land borders between Africa and Europe closed, many citizens from both continents found themselves trapped.

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Spanish police search river after sightings of Nile crocodile

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Residents of towns in Castilla y Léon region told to stay away from banks of Pisuerga River

Police and specialist wildlife officers are using boats and a drone to search a stretch of river in north-west Spain after three sightings of what is thought to be a Nile crocodile.

People in and around the towns of Simancas and Tordesillas in the Castilla y León region have been told to stay away from the banks of the Pisuerga River while the search continues.

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South Africa may hold the answer to who murdered Olof Palme

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The trail for the killer of the Swedish prime minister had gone cold until a diplomat picked up the 1986 case as a hobby

Dag Hammarskjöld brought me to Olof Palme. Two Swedish leaders, both supporting small nations on the world scene, both of whom refused to be controlled by global superpowers; both died a violent death. Were they also victims of the same forces?

For 11 years I investigated the mysterious aeroplane crash that killed the former UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld, a a project that became the subject of the documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld.

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Sweden to present findings on Olof Palme assassination

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Sources say South Africa handed over dossier on 1986 murder, but not everyone is hopeful mystery will be solved

The findings of an investigation into one of the world’s most infamous cold cases, the 1986 assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, will finally be made public in Stockholm on Wednesday.

Palme was shot in the back at close range on a Stockholm street while walking home from the cinema with his wife Lisbeth on a February evening. The gunman disappeared into a side street and the mystery has thwarted the Swedish police ever since, giving rise to an industry built around competing speculative theories.

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Ex-Salvadoran colonel to be tried over murder of six priests in 1989

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Inocente Orlando Montano accused of planning atrocity aimed at stopping peace talks

A former Salvadoran army colonel who served as a government security minister will appear in court in Madrid on Monday to face trial over the murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter in 1989.

The attack, at the Central American University (UCA) in San Salvador, was planned and authorised by senior military commanders and was an attempt to derail peace talks aimed at ending the country’s civil war.

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Velázquez painting brought to life by historical reenactment group in Seville

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Surrender of Breda, immortalised by painter, was significant moment in Dutch war of independence

Anyone wandering along a quiet street in central Seville at 8.30pm on Saturday would have witnessed the odd sight of a 17th-century Dutch governor wearing a Covid-19 mask as he once again handed over his city to Spanish forces.

The Surrender of Breda, a significant moment in the Dutch war of independence immortalised in Diego Velázquez’s eponymous painting, was brought to life by a historical reenactment group to mark the 395th anniversary of the event, and the Spanish painter’s 421st birthday – both on 5 June, albeit 26 years apart.

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Anne Hidalgo likely to be reelected as Paris mayor after forging green alliance

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Opinion poll puts Socialist at 44% of intentions to vote, well ahead of her closest rival

The mayor of Paris has opened up a strong lead in her bid to be reelected after forging an alliance with the city’s ecologists.

An opinion poll put the Socialist Anne Hidalgo at 44% of intentions to vote, well ahead of her closest rival, the centre-right candidate Rachida Dati, a former justice minister under Nicolas Sarkozy. 

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French health ban keeps Allied D-day veterans away

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Normandy locals mourn the absence of the Allied soldiers forced to stay at home for the first time in 76 years

In Ranville cemetery, a lone piper playing Amazing Grace walked solemnly between the graves as the early morning sun reflected off the rows of white headstones.

Every 6 June for the last 75 years, the soldiers who made it off the Normandy beaches in 1944 have returned to remember comrades who did not. Every year, the pilgrimage became a different kind of battle but still they came, in fewer numbers but just as determined to overcome the odds as they were when they landed to liberate France.

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Europe’s big two kiss and make up for pandemic rescue deal

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Germany amazed the whole continent with last week’s stimulus package, but it paves the way for countries such as France to agree an effective coronavirus response

From champion of austerity to Europe’s biggest spender – Germany has travelled a long way in just a few months. The notoriously frugal ministry of finance has agreed to spend €130bn – a sum equal to 4% of national income – on more than 50 initiatives to promote growth across the country.

This breathtaking investment programme comes on top of the almost 30% of GDP the government has so far spent on rescuing businesses and protecting jobs during the coronavirus crisis.

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‘Regrettable’: Germany reacts to Trump plan to withdraw US troops

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Reduction of 9,500 personnel criticised by the German right and welcomed by the left

Donald Trump’s plans to withdraw roughly a third of the US troops stationed in Germany have been criticised in the country by conservatives and welcomed by leftwing politicians.

The US president has reportedly ordered the Pentagon to reduce the number of troops by 9,500 from the 34,500 permanently assigned in Germany as part of a long-standing arrangement with Washington’s Nato ally.

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Merkel among winners as Europeans give verdict on anti-Covid battles

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Satisfaction levels across the continent have risen and fallen, but nowhere have they plunged as for Boris Johnson’s government

All across the continent, most Europeans now trust their leaders generally, and how they have handled the coronavirus pandemic in particular, a little less than when the crisis began – but nowhere has public confidence fallen as far and as fast as in the UK.

Even leaders seen as having managed Covid-19 the most successfully, such as Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel and Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen, have suffered slight dips in popular satisfaction as the weeks have worn on.

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‘We need the Brits’: Benidorm banks on August tourist surge

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Spanish resort ‘like a ghost town’ as UK’s Covid-19 lockdown keeps its best customers away

There’ll be no craic at the Shamrock tonight, says Lisa Griffin, who has run the Irish pub in Benidorm for 25 years.

Griffin’s 15 staff, who include a four-piece band, are on furlough and no one knows what will happen when the Spanish government’s scheme comes to an end on 30 June.

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US drops charges against banker investigated by Daphne Caruana Galizia

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Family of murdered journalist call on Malta to prosecute Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejadin, whose Pilatus Bank was shut down for money laundering

The US department of justice has made an unusual decision to drop charges against a prominent Iranian banker who was convicted of bank fraud in March after prosecutors in New York said they did not have the resources to continue to prosecute the case on appeal.

The decision by the DOJ represents an extraordinary turn of events in an investigation that began in 2013 and was closely followed in Malta, where the defendant in the case controlled Pilatus Bank, which had ties to the country’s former prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and other top officials.

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Donald Trump orders 9,500 US troops to leave Germany

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White House says move due to more Nato defence spending, not tensions with Angela Merkel

Donald Trump has ordered the US military to remove nearly 9,500 troops from Germany in a move likely to raise concerns in Europe about the US commitment to the region.

The move would reduce US troop numbers in Germany to 25,000, compared with the 34,500 currently there, a senior US official said.

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EU pledges to lift internal border controls by end of month

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Ban on non-essential travel into EU by foreign nationals is extended until 1 July

The EU has pledged to lift border controls inside its territory by the end of the month while extending a ban on travellers coming from outside the bloc until 1 July. 

The extension of the ban on non-essential travel by foreign nationals into the EU’s border free-travel zone was approved by the EU’s 27 home affairs ministers on Friday by video conference.

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Vitamin K could help fight coronavirus, study suggests

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Scientists in Netherlands explore possible link between deficiency and Covid-19 deaths

Patients who have died or been admitted to intensive care with Covid-19 have been found to be deficient in a vitamin found in spinach, eggs and hard and blue cheeses, raising hopes that dietary change might be one part of the answer to combating the disease.

Researchers studying patients who were admitted to the Canisius Wilhelmina hospital in the Dutch city of Nijmegen have extolled the benefits of vitamin K after discovering a link between deficiency and the worst coronavirus outcomes.

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‘We want to move on’: Praia da Luz reacts to news in Madeleine McCann case

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Recent developments stir painful memories for residents of small Portuguese coastal town

The sunny street that leads to the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz is quiet, its silence interrupted only by the chirping of birds carried on a warm breeze.

A pair of blue curtains is drawn across the window of the ground-floor apartment, the old balcony door has been replaced by an iron one and the hedge outside is perfectly trimmed.

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Madeleine McCann suspect investigated over two other missing children – reports

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Christian Brückner may be linked to disappearance of a five-year-old girl in Germany and six-year-old boy in Portugal

German prosecutors are investigating whether the prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann was involved in a similar case of a five-year-old girl who went missing in Germany in 2015.

Reports on Friday night also said authorities were looking into connections with the disappearance of a six-year-old German boy in Portugal in 1996.

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