Category Archives: Europe

Gilets jaunes banned from protesting near Notre Dame in Paris

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France’s interior minister says demonstrators are planning action on Saturday

Anti-government gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protesters will be banned from demonstrating near Paris’s fire-ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral on Saturday, as the police chief warned that any plans to march on the banks of the river Seine near the site were “pure provocation”.

The French interior minister, Christophe Castaner, warned that rioters would be on the streets in several major cities in France on Saturday but “particularly Paris”. He suggested that extremist groups and troublemakers were planning to repeat the scenes of arson, looting and vandalism by masked men that took place on Paris’s Champs-Elysées last month on the edge of anti-government marches by demonstrators. He urged against Paris becoming “the capital of rioters” for the day.

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A referendum on Poroshenko but also a very Ukrainian election | Shaun Walker

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Some question whether rival is also shackled by old system that reasserted itself despite hopes of Maidan revolution

When Petro Poroshenko won Ukraine’s presidential election five years ago, it was with the campaign slogan: “Live in a new way!”

Ukrainians voted for him in the hope he would make real the hopes and desires of all those who had poured into the streets for the Maidan revolution and forced the country’s corrupt kleptocratic president Viktor Yanukovych to flee.

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Greta Thunberg hopes to join climate protests during London visit

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Swedish 16-year-old, who is taking campaign to parliament, keen to be part of Extinction Rebellion action

Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old founder of the school strikes for action against climate change, has said she hopes to join the Extinction Rebellion protests when she visits London next week.

The Swedish activist will also take the campaign to the UK parliament, where she will speak to dozens of MPs including the Green party MP Caroline Lucas, the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the environment secretary, Michael Gove.

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Notre Dame fire cause may have been electrical – official

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Blaze at Paris cathedral being treated as accidental but search of interior yet to take place due to safety risk

Investigators think an electrical short circuit may have caused the fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral, according to a judicial police official.

An initial assessment of the cathedral was made on Wednesday but safety hazards have prevented a search of its charred interior, the official told Associated Press.

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Resisting the right: the woman who is a beacon of hope in Salvini’s Italy

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Antonella Bundu is the lead candidate in a coalition of anti-fascist radical-left parties

On a peaceful Monday morning in March 2018, a Senegalese street vendor named Idy Diene was murdered on the Vespucci bridge in Florence. The man who fired the six fatal shots was an Italian pensioner who told the police he had shot randomly at the first person he encountered. He had previously attempted to take his own life.

Antonella Bundu, 49, was one of the first people to arrive at the scene. She burst into tears when she was told that under the blood-stained sheet lay Diene. She had come to know him well, watching him set up and take down his makeshift table of cigarette lighters, tissues and umbrellas.

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Italian broadcaster sparks fury over plans for gender-specific channels

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Rai’s proposals to show different content to men and women condemned as sexist

Italian state broadcaster Rai has sparked fury over a proposal to create separate male and female TV channels.

A reorganisation of some of the company’s channels as part of its strategic plan could result in one airing shows and films geared more towards men, and one aimed at women.

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The Guardian view on Britain and the EU elections: get together to stay together | Editorial

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There is a public majority against Brexit. The political parties must cooperate to ensure that its voice is heard in any elections

If they take place, European elections in Britain would ideally serve three complementary purposes. The first would be to widen the national debate about Britain’s relations with Europe. The second would be to ensure the electoral argument has a pro-European outcome. The third would be to send a clear pro-European message from British voters to the EU. All this is not going as well for the pro-European side as it should be.

The political context for EU elections remains healthy for pro-Europeans. Brexit has proved far more difficult than leavers originally claimed. Leavers are very deeply divided. The problems have contributed to some public rethinking. Since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016, public opinion has slowly but steadily shifted towards remaining. The current poll of polls on the issue shows a 54%-46% remain lead. A ComRes poll this week has the gap at 58%-42%.

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Crusader armies were remarkably genetically diverse, study finds

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DNA research adds to evidence soldiers heading east struck up relationships with locals

Crusader armies were made up of people from remarkably genetically diverse backgrounds, hailing not just from western Europe but also much further east, according to a new study that gives unprecedented insight into the fighters’ lives.

The Crusades to the Holy Land were spread over two centuries, with many Europeans heading east to fight, and others turning up to trade.

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Bill Drummond to lead Irish border poll and hand out hot cross buns

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The KLF founder will ask citizens if they agree with a clause he proposes adding to the Good Friday agreement

His best-known actions include burning £1m, firing blanks at the 1992 Brit awards and dropping a dead sheep on the red carpet of a luxury hotel as a member of the KLF. But Bill Drummond’s latest public display is more sedate: on Good Friday, he will stand on the Irish border, handing out homemade hot cross buns and conducting an informal referendum.

Between 10am and 12pm on 19 April, Drummond will ask the first 40 people who cross the border between Derry and Donegal whether they agree or disagree with adding a clause of his creation to the Good Friday agreement:

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Tunisia holds UN Libya arms trafficking expert in jail

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UN says arrest and detention of Moncef Kartas violates diplomatic immunity

A UN-appointed expert on breaches of the Libyan arms embargo has been arrested and kept in a Tunisian jail for nearly a month.

Moncef Kartas, a Tunisian-German dual national, was arrested on 26 March. He is one of six UN experts appointed to investigate breaches of the UN-imposed embargo on arms to Libya first introduced in 2011. The UN says his detention is a violation of his diplomatic immunity.

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Barcelona school removes 200 sexist children’s books

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Other schools look to follow after Tàber school takes out one-third of its collection, deeming the books ‘highly stereotypical and sexist’

Several schools across Barcelona are considering purging their libraries of stereotypical and sexist children’s books, after one removed around 200 titles, including Little Red Riding Hood and the story of the legend of Saint George, from its library.

The Tàber school’s infant library of around 600 children’s books was reviewed by the Associació Espai i Lleure as part of a project that aims to highlight hidden sexist content. The group reviewed the characters in each book, whether or not they speak and what roles they perform, finding that 30% of the books were highly sexist, had strong stereotypes and were, in its opinion, of no pedagogical value.

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Kim Jong-un to visit Russia to meet Putin for first time

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Summit between North Korean leader and Russian president to take place in late April

The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, will visit Russia in late April for his first meeting with Vladimir Putin, Moscow has said.

“Following an invitation from Vladimir Putin ... Kim Jong-un will visit Russia in the second half of April,” said the Kremlin in a statement on its website on Thursday.

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Ukraine elections: actor and comedian poised to win crushing victory

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Volodymyr Zelenskiy is hot favourite to triumph in Sunday’s presidential election

Latest polling in Ukraine suggests that the actor and comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who has eschewed traditional political campaigning and given little insight into his policy positions, is set to win a crushing victory in Sunday’s presidential election.

Zelenskiy is known for his television series Servant of the People in which he plays a history teacher who wins a shock victory in presidential elections. He is now odds-on to pull off the feat in real life, after capitalising on widespread disappointment with the incumbent, Petro Poroshenko, who won elections in 2014 after the Maidan revolution kicked out the previous government.

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Trotsky to be expelled from France – archive, 18 April 1934

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18 April 1934: “Trotsky had not kept his promise to remain neutral when he was granted the hospitality of France,” said the French minister of the Interior

Paris, April, 17.
The French Government, at its meeting to-day, decided to expel Trotsky from France. Commenting on this decision, M. Sarraut, the Minister of the Interior, said that “Trotsky had not kept his promise to remain neutral when he was granted the hospitality of France.” Trotsky, M. Sarraut said, would be asked to leave France (and, in the first place, the Paris district) within the shortest possible time.

Related: From the archive: The expulsion of Trotsky from the Soviet party

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‘A whole generation has gone’: Ukrainians seek better life in Poland

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As Ukraine prepares to elect a new president, millions of its citizens have moved across the border

When the small business run by Kristina Melnytska’s father began to struggle in 2014 he did what hundreds of thousands of other Ukrainians were doing and moved his family to Poland.

Melnytska, then 19, enrolled in a university in the eastern city of Lublin. She worked long nights in a kebab shop, where she was paid about £1 an hour. Five years later she is still here and one of an estimated 2 million Ukrainians working and living in Poland.

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‘Exhausted’ polar bear found 700km from home in Russian village

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Environmental activists have blamed climate change for appearance of polar bear in the Kamchatka Peninsula

Residents of a village in Russia’s far eastern Kamchatka Peninsula have been stunned by the sight of a polar bear prowling for food hundreds of miles from its usual habitat.

Russian media reported on Wednesday that the exhausted-looking animal apparently traveled from Chukotka to the village of Tilichiki on Kamchatka, some 700km (434 miles) south.

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Trump’s new Cuba crackdown puts US at odds with Canada and Europe

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US will allow lawsuits against firms using property nationalised by the revolution, cap remittances and restrict ‘non-family’ travel

Donald Trump has taken another step towards reversing Barack Obama’s historic rapprochement with Cuba with a measure that earned swift criticism from allies in Canada and Europe.

The US announced on Wednesday that it would enable lawsuits against foreign companies that use properties nationalised by the communist government after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.

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Portugal crash: at least 29 killed on tourist bus in Madeira

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Bus was reportedly carrying 55 passengers, most of them German, when it veered off a road on a bend before rolling down a hill

At least twenty-nine people, mostly German tourists, have died and a further 28 have been injured after a tourist bus overturned on the Portuguese island of Madeira, local media have reported.

A battered white bus on its side surrounded by firefighters could be seen in photos published by Portuguese media, while SIC Television said there were 19 ambulances at the scene following the accident, which occurred around 5.30pm GMT.

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Notre Dame Cathedral: before and after the devastating fire – video

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Notre Dame Cathedral was '15 to 30 minutes' away from complete destruction as firefighters battled to stop flames reaching its Gothic bell towers, French authorities have said. The blaze destroyed the roof and spire of the Parisian landmark. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has said he wants to see the cathedral rebuilt 'more beautiful than before' within five years, but there are warnings that the repairs could take decades

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