KYIV – Russia and Ukraine were preparing Monday for their first talks since Moscow’s invasion, as fighting raged and Western-led sanctions started to bite with the ruble collapsing. Ukraine said Sunday it had agreed to send a delegation to meet Russian representatives on the border with Belarus, which would be the foes’ first public contact since war … Read more
BEIJING – Revisions in China’s updated Cybersecurity Review Measures took effect from Tuesday. One of them stipulates that network platform operators that hold personal information of more than one million users have to go through a cybersecurity review if they plan to list their shares overseas. This is considered to be one of the latest … Read more
PARIS: France will soon drop its requirement of a negative Covid test for vaccinated travellers from outside the European Union, as daily infection numbers continue to fall, Europe Minister Clement Beaune said Tuesday. “We again required tests in December over the Omicron variant. In the coming days we will announce that tests are no longer … Read more
ISTANBUL – The frozen bodies of seven more migrants have been discovered close to the Greek border, Turkish officials said on Thursday, bringing the death toll in the diplomatically-charged incident to 19. Turkey accuses border guards in neighbour Greece of allowing the migrants to die in the winter cold after stripping them of their clothes … Read more
PARIS: Brexit has hurt two-way trade between the European Union and Britain, with the auto, textile and aviation sectors the worst hit, the French economy ministry said on Thursday. The ministry released data on the sidelines of an EU ministerial meeting in Paris dedicated to reviewing the fallout from Britain’s departure from the bloc a year … Read more
The United Kingdom’s post-Brexit foreign policy mission phrase, “Global Britain,” invokes Britain as a buccaneering trading nation, free from the “shackles” of the European Union, moving toward a brighter future that lies beyond Europe. A more detailed codification of the mission was presented in the policy document, “Global Britain in a Competitive Age”, published earlier … Read more
BANGKOK: The exit of energy titans TotalEnergies and Chevron from Myanmar’s billion dollar gas industry has been hailed by rights groups, but analysts say it will not significantly weaken the generals and may even enrich the military in the short term. Both firms had faced pressure to cut financial links with the junta that toppled … Read more
VIENNA – Painted in blood red on an improvised memorial in Vienna, the number 31 is a stark reminder of a grim toll: the women killed by men in Austria last year. After several particularly horrific cases among the killings were widely reported in the media, the issue of femicide is now squarely under the … Read more
CHEVENING: Britain and the European Union are to intensify efforts to resolve a dispute over post-Brexit trade in Northern Ireland, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and European Commission vice president Maros Sefcovic said after talks on Friday. In a joint statement, the two described their two-day meeting as “cordial” and said they had agreed to … Read more
WARSAW: More than 100,000 people have died in Poland from Covid since the start of the pandemic, the government said Monday, as the mortality rate in the country is among the highest in the world. “It’s another sad day but particularly so today because we have crossed the threshold of 100,000 deaths,” Health Minister Adam Niedzielski told … Read more
MADRID: Spain’s fragmented parliament gave final approval on Tuesday to the biggest budget in the country’s history, with billions of euros from EU’s huge Covid-19 recovery fund. Passage of the 2022 spending plan boosts the chances that Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s minority government will survive until the end of its mandate in late 2023. Lawmakers … Read more
BRUSSELS: The EU’s top court on Tuesday upheld a law meant to shield European businesses from extraterritorial US sanctions, while recognising it did little to protect companies from the American punishment. The European Court of Justice was ruling on a complaint brought by an Iranian bank, Bank Melli, over contracts severed by a Deutsche Telekom … Read more
LONDON: Britain and Australia finalised in a virtual ceremony on Thursday a free trade deal that is expected to unlock more than £10 billion in trade annually. The deal, which was agreed in principle in June, is the first free trade deal that Britain negotiated from scratch since its EU exit earlier this year to have … Read more
BRATISLAVA: The Slovak government allowed shops, ski resorts and churches to reopen Friday to those who are vaccinated or have recovered from Covid, despite having the highest infection rate in the world. The EU member of 5.4 million people, which went into partial lockdown late last month, registered 1,099 cases per 100,000 people over the … Read more
DUNMURRY, United Kingdom: In a factory in Dunmurry on the edge of Belfast, black and green boxes of ventilation systems destined for Poland are piled high, each bearing the European energy label. The EU member state is Brookvent’s largest market, despite the UK’s departure from the bloc and disputes about post-Brexit trading arrangements in Northern Ireland. … Read more
ISLAMABAD: The European Union (EU) has welcomed the progress made by Pakistan to implement the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) action plans and also lauded adoption of the “Protection of Journalists and Media Professionals Bill” by the parliament, that later became an act with the presidential approval. A joint communiqué issued early Wednesday at the … Read more
ANKARA, Dec 2, 2021 (AFP) – The European Union said on Thursday it was injecting 325 million euros for refugees in Turkey, part of a huge funding plan for the country, which hosts the world’s largest refugee population. The EU approved a plan in June to provide Turkey with three billion euros from 2021 to 2024 … Read more
THE HAGUE: Europe’s drug watchdog launched an accelerated review Thursday of a Covid-19 vaccine by Franco-Austrian biotech firm Valneva, for which the EU has already signed a deal for up to 60 million doses. The jab — which uses “inactivated” viruses rather than the new mRNA technology of the Pfizer or Moderna shots — showed … Read more
RIYADH: The EU is moving forward with plans to build a cross-continental financial system with four new legislative proposals, Bloomberg reported. This comes six years after it was first announced and a year after the latest re-launch. The EU’s executive arm hopes a “capital markets union” will break down barriers between 27 national financial markets and rulebooks … Read more
GLASGOW: Corporate carbon polluters plant trees to counter their CO2 emissions, but activists warn against greenwashing and say such afforestation schemes detract from the emissions reductions needed to combat climate change. Voluntary carbon offsetting is being hotly debated at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. Here’s a backgrounder. How does it work? Carbon offsetting is when a company … Read more
VIENNA: Anti-Semitism has grown during the coronavirus pandemic, particularly online, a new EU report said on Tuesday, but gaps in data make it difficult to measure how bad the problem really is. As well as old lies being revived, “new anti-Semitic myths and conspiracy theories that blame Jews for the pandemic have come to the … Read more
RAMALLAH: The European Union (EU) has provided US $18.8 million to the Palestinian authority to help it pay October’s salaries and pensions for staff in the health and education sector, according to a statement on Wednesday. The money was already transferred to the Palestinian ministry of finance, the EU office in Palestine said in the … Read more
VELIKA KLADUSA: Huddled around cooking fires as winter looms in Bosnia, refugees are risking beatings and humiliation from Croatian police in the desperate hope of a new life in the European Union. Largely from Afghanistan, many of them have endured months or years of flight from war and poverty, only to be met by Croatian … Read more
PARIS: Facebook on Monday announced plans to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to build the “metaverse”, a virtual reality version of the internet that the tech giant sees as the future. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been a leading voice in Silicon Valley hype around the idea of the metaverse, which would blur … Read more
BRUSSELS: The European Union has presented a ‘toolbox’ of measures to mitigate an energy crunch that threatens to send Europeans’ power bills soaring. The European Commission has been under pressure to act on the looming crisis, even though individual EU governments are more directly responsible for their energy sources and taxation. Consumers’ “concern is understandable, … Read more
KABUL: Afghanistan’s new Taliban government has warned the US and European envoys that continued attempts to pressure them through sanctions will undermine security and could trigger a wave of economic refugees. Acting foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi told Western diplomats at talks in Doha that “weakening the Afghan government is not in the interest of … Read more
PITTSBURGH: The US and the EU officials will hold two days of high-level meetings in Pittsburgh this week in an effort to repair relations damaged under the administration of Donald Trump and boost cooperation on technology issues. The timing of the inaugural meeting of the Trade and Technology Council (TTC) is important, coming amid a global … Read more
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia’s exports rose 18.4 per cent to 95.59 billion ringgit ($22.85 billion) in August from a year ago, as exports to all major markets, Asean, China, the US, the European Union (EU), and Japan recorded a positive growth, official data showed on Tuesday. The export growth was contributed mainly by robust external demand … Read more
