Category Archives: Europe

Prague TV tower under fire as dark reminder of city’s antisemitic past

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Memorial should be built at site of tourist attraction erected over Jewish cemetery, say campaigners

It has been called one of the world’s ugliest structures, pointing above Prague like a jabbing metallic finger while offering visitors panoramic views of the Czech capital’s more aesthetically pleasing sites.

Now the city’s looming 216-metre (709ft) television tower – one of the most distinctive architectural legacies of communism – is the subject of renewed complaints from the Prague Jewish community, which says it is a brooding reminder of the antisemitism of the regime that ruled the former Czechoslovakia for more than 40 years and whose dark history needs to be officially recognised.

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I have seen the tragedy of Mediterranean migrants. This ‘art’ makes me feel uneasy

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The vessel that became a coffin for hundreds has gone on display at the Venice Biennale. It intends to stir our conscience – but is it a spectacle that exploits disaster?

On the night of 18 April 2015, about 180 kilometres from the Italian island of Lampedusa, a fishing boat capsized with hundreds of migrants on board. Among the waves and beneath the ship’s 23-metre hull, 700 passengers who had dreamed of a better life drowned in the waters of the Mediterranean.

Last week that giant, rusty vessel arrived in Venice on the occasion of the city’s Biennale art festival, where it went on display on Saturday in an installation designed by the artist Christoph Büchel.

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Thousands march in Cardiff calling for Welsh independence

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Demonstrators say Brexit and austerity have increased support for leaving the UK

Thousands have demonstrated in Cardiff to call for an independent Wales in what organisers said was the first such march in Welsh history.

Some protesters said they had been lifelong supporters of independence, while others said they were converted by Brexit and austerity. A recent poll for ITV Wales showed that 12% of people support self-government.

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Mette Frederiksen: the anti-migrant left leader who’s set to sweep to power in Denmark

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Social Democrats leader has dragged her party sharply to the right, say critics

She marked her return on Facebook, with a video straight out of a Quentin Tarantino film, buttoning her jacket, arranging her hair and slipping on stiletto heels to heavy metal music. “I’m ready again,” she declared to camera. “Let’s get this bus rolling.”

Mette Frederiksen, leader of Denmark’s opposition Social Democrats, was in hospital with food poisoning when the prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, called a general election last week, and was two days late joining the campaign.

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Dutch family in cash plea to save ancestor’s tulip mania paintings

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Crowdfunding appeal launched to keep €750,000 volume on display in Netherlands

Each of the 104 pages in Nicolaes Tulp’s book of tulips contains a watercolour painted by the artist Jacob Marrel, with a record of the market values of the bulbs at the height of 17th-century tulip mania, the world’s first speculation bubble.

The catalogue bears testament to a period in the 1630s when the Netherlands was the richest country in the world and single tulip bulbs would sell for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled worker. However, the market crashed dramatically in 1637.

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Same-sex selfie kiss kickstarts Matteo Salvini photobomb protest

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Far-right Italian deputy is hounded by photobombers after image goes viral

When two Sicilian women shared a kiss on 26 April, they kickstarted a “selfie-guerrilla’’ photobomb protest against Italy’s far-right deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini.

Matilde Rizzo and Gaia Parisi, both 19, approached Salvini, the leader of the League, for a selfie after a rally in Caltanissetta, Sicily. While Salvini was preparing to smile for the photo, the trap was set by the two young women who kissed in front of the camera.

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‘Prostitution is seen as a leisure activity here’: tackling Spain’s sex traffickers | Annie Kelly

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It’s staggeringly big business in Spain, where demand is being met by traffickers. Can a groundbreaking team turn the tide?

On a sunny morning in Madrid, two young women duck down a side street, into a residential block and up to an apartment front door. Then they start knocking. Marcella and Maria spend a lot of time banging on doors and yelling through letterboxes all over the city. Most of the time, these doors never open. When they do, the two women could find themselves in trouble. Their job on the frontline of Spain’s fight against sex trafficking is a dangerous one; both have been assaulted and threatened. Yet they keep on knocking, because they have been on the other side of those doors, forced to sell their bodies for a handful of euros, dozens of times a day, seven days a week.

To say that prostitution is big business in Spain would be a gross understatement. The country has become known as the brothel of Europe, after a 2011 United Nations report cited Spain as the third biggest capital of prostitution in the world, behind Thailand and Puerto Rico. Although the Spanish Socialist party, which two weeks ago won another term in government, has promised to make it illegal to pay for sex, prostitution has boomed since it was decriminalised here in 1995. Recent estimates put revenue from Spain’s domestic sex trade at $26.5bn a year, with hundreds of licensed brothels and an estimated workforce of 300,000.

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Second Brexit referendum would be doing SNP’s work, Boris Johnson claims

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Ex-minister hits out at campaigners pushing for a fresh vote

Boris Johnson has accused supporters of a second Brexit referendum of “doing the work of the Scottish National party” by making a second Scottish independence vote more likely and threatening the union.

In a speech in Aberdeen on Friday, the former foreign secretary and perennial Conservative leadership hopeful sought to turn the tables on remainers who argue that Brexit would increase the risk of a second independence referendum.

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Donald Tusk: chance of Brexit being cancelled could be 30%

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EU chief says good reason to believe leave vote could be reversed in second referendum

The chances of the UK staying in the EU are as high as 30% as the country would be likely to reject Brexit in a second referendum, the president of the European council, Donald Tusk, has said.

The bloc’s most senior official claimed the British public had only truly debated Brexit after the 2016 referendum and there was significant reason to believe the leave vote could be reversed.

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Varoufakis draws fire over run for German EU elections seat

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Old allies accuse former Greek finance minister of splintering leftwing vote at a time of far-right revival

Four years after Greece’s former “rock-star finance minister” clashed with his northern European counterparts over austerity measures and debt relief, Yanis Varoufakis is once again taking the fight to his old enemy.

This time, he hopes to make friends rather than foes: at the end of this month, Varoufakis will try to convince voters to elect him as a member of the European parliament – not in his native Greece, but in Germany.

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Can Yanis Varoufakis save Europe? – video

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The Greek economist is back battling the EU establishment, this time at the helm of a new movement, DiEM25. Backed by Pamela Anderson and the world’s most famous cyborg, he is fighting ultra-right populism with a radical agenda he thinks can restore people's lost faith in democracy. As the European parliamentary elections approach, is anyone listening? Phoebe Greenwood finds out 

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Blow up: how half a tonne of cocaine transformed the life of an island

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In 2001, a smugglers’ yacht washed up in the Azores and disgorged its contents. The island of São Miguel was quickly flooded with high-grade cocaine – and nearly 20 years on, it is still feeling the effects.

By Matthew Bremner

Around midday on 6 June 2001, locals from Pilar da Bretanha, a parish on the northwestern tip of the Atlantic island São Miguel, saw a white yacht, about 40 feet long, drifting aimlessly near the area’s sheer cliffs. None of the villagers had ever seen a boat of this size floating so close to that part of the coast, where the sea was shallow, the tides strong and the rocks razor-sharp. They supposed it was an amateur sailor who had got lost.

In fact, the man sailing the boat was a skilled seaman. Two Italian passports, a Spanish passport and a Spanish national ID card were later found in his possession, all of which showed the same 44-year-old with weathered skin and dark curly hair. But each of the four documents listed a different name. In the previous three months, he had crossed the Atlantic twice, sailing more than 3,000 miles from the Canary Islands, just west of Morocco, to north-east Venezuela, and then back again, to São Miguel, 1,000 miles west of Portugal.

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Swedish prosecutor to give decision on Assange rape inquiry

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Ruling will be given on Monday over whether to reopen case that dates back to 2010

Sweden’s state prosecutor will announce on Monday whether she will reopen a preliminary investigation into a rape allegation against Julian Assange.

The WikiLeaks founder is in prison in Britain after he was arrested last month after seven years holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The US wants to extradite him in a case relating to WikiLeaks’ massive release of sensitive military and diplomatic documents.

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Paris police say no danger of toxic inhalation from air near Notre Dame

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High lead levels after cathedral fire have led to concerns from environmental groups

Paris authorities have warned of very high lead levels on the ground immediately surrounding the fire-damaged Notre Dame cathedral but insisted there was no danger from breathing the air, after environmental groups likened the site to “toxic waste”.

The latter are preparing to step up pressure this week over the possible pollution danger from toxic metal particles from the cathedral fire. Campaign groups will hold a press conference on Friday to warn of their concerns about the danger from the combustion of lead in last month’s blaze which destroyed the Gothic cathedral’s roof, spreading lead-laden dust.

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Nazi rhetoric and Holocaust denial: Belgium’s alarming rise in antisemitism

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Report shows 39% of Belgian Jews have been harassed, with some fearing to wear the kippa in public

The doors of the Jewish Museum of Belgium, in Brussels, never used to be locked during daytime visiting hours. That all changed after a day in May 2014 when a jihadi gunman shot dead four people during an attack on the museum in one of the country’s most shocking terrorist atrocities.

Nearly four years after the attack, antisemitism has again been making headlines in Belgium, a country that symbolises Europe’s diversity. Not only is the capital, Brussels, home to the EU institutions and Nato, Belgium is made up of three linguistic groups (French, Dutch and German), making it something of a laboratory for European compromise.

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EU ‘outright dangerous’ in its use of natural resources, says WWF

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About 2.8 planets would be needed if rest of world followed suit, biocapacity data shows

Europe is using up natural resources so quickly that the planet’s ability to replenish itself over the year would be exhausted by this Friday if everyone consumed as much, a new analysis has found.

It would take 2.8 planets to extend the EU’s rate of consumption of fuels, food, fibres, land and timber to all the world’s people, according to data collected by WWF and the Global Footprint Network.

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Empty North Sea gas fields to be used to bury 10m tonnes of C02

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Ports of Rotterdam, Antwerp and Ghent to pipe greenhouse gas into vast under-sea cavities

Three of the largest ports in Europe – Rotterdam, Antwerp and Ghent – are to be used to capture and bury 10m tonnes of CO2 emissions under the North Sea in what will be the biggest project of its kind in the world.

The ports, which account for one-third of the total greenhouse gas emissions from the Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg region, would be used to pipe the gas into a porous reservoir of sandstone about two miles (3km) below the seabed.

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Donald Trump tells Iran ‘call me’ over lifting sanctions

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President suggests US could help revive Iran’s economy in return for no-nuclear weapons pledge

Donald Trump has offered Iran direct talks, saying its leaders should “call me” and suggested the US would help revive the country’s economy as long as Iran did not acquire nuclear weapons.

The impromptu offer by the US president, if serious, represents a dramatic lowering of the bar set by his administration for lifting extensive sanctions, including an oil embargo. Iran is already party to a 2015 agreement that strictly limits its nuclear programme and places it under close scrutiny. Trump withdrew the US from the Obama-era treaty a year ago.

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Berlin park designates ‘pink zone’ areas for drug dealers

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Repeated attempts by police to clear dealers from Görlitzer Park in Kreuzberg prompts move by park manager

Drug dealers in Berlin are to be given designated spaces in a city centre park to carry out transactions, leading to criticism that authorities have capitulated to criminal gangs.

For years there has been a heated debate about Görlitzer Park, a popular meeting point in the trendy southern Berlin district of Kreuzberg, which has been attracting an ever increasing number of drug dealers. Local people said they were reluctant to let children and pets roam free there.

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‘Global Britain’ is doing its foreign policy on autopilot | Martin Kettle

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Paralysis over Brexit means the country is burying its head in the sand over the very real challenges ahead

The European elections Theresa May never intended Britain to participate in are now only two weeks away. They are inevitably being fought as a proxy contest for Brexit by all the political parties. The results will be interpreted as a verdict on Brexit too, just as last week’s English local elections have been, and probably in much the same careless way.

Yet it would be a stretch to pretend that, for once in our recent history, the UK’s European elections are actually focusing on Britain’s and Europe’s place in the 21st-century world. The truth is far less flattering. These elections can better be understood as another episode in the national – and, in particular, Conservative – trauma over the historic decline of British power, of which the referendum was an interim climax. The elections are therefore unlikely to be cathartic or cleansing. On the contrary, they are dragging us deeper into the ongoing psychodrama that was intensified by the vote in 2016.

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