Author: staff
A motorbike caravan of government supporters took to the streets of Caracas on Monday during a National Assembly debate on a proposed antipiracy bill. Some protesters wore pirate costumes and carried posters, staging a symbolic demonstration as lawmakers discussed legislation related to freedom of navigation and trade. The rally coincided with the arrival of senior officials at the assembly building. The bill, approved in a first reading, is set for a second legislative debate before potentially becoming law, while public demonstrations continued outside the chamber.
“We need a fundamental discussion on the Europeanization of customs,” Cavazzini told POLITICO. As chair of the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO), the lawmaker from the German Greens has been pushing the Council, the EU’s intergovernmental branch, to allow the customs reform to make the bloc’s single market more of a unified reality. European lawmaker Anna Cavazzini. | Martin Bertrand and Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images EU capitals worry — as always — about handing over too much power to the eurocrats in Brussels. But the main outstanding issue where negotiators disagree is more prosaic: it’s…
By Euronews with AP Published on 23/12/2025 – 7:52 GMT+1 •Updated 7:52 The US military said it struck another boat suspected of smuggling drugs in international waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Monday, killing one person. At the direction of US Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, “Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a low-profile vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organisations in international waters,” the US Southern Command wrote in a post on X. “Intelligence confirmed the low-profile vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” it added. The strikes…
Poland’s long-planned mega-airport is set to open in 2032 with a new name: Port Polska. The transport hub, located between Warsaw and the smaller city of Łódź, hopes to welcome 40 million passengers annually. It puts it in the same league as the likes of London Heathrow and Istanbul. The project received approval in 2017, but progress has been marred by a corruption scandal involving the previous government. Current Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, who was elected in 2023, has vowed to give the scheme “a clean start”. He previously said the airport will “completely revolutionise travel across the country…
Flood of parliamentary questions Marc Henrichmann, a conservative lawmaker and the chairman of a special committee in Germany’s Bundestag that oversees the country’s intelligence services, said that while the government is not obliged to divulge classified or highly sensitive information in its answers to parliamentary questions, Russian intelligence services can still piece together valuable insights from the sheer volume and variety of AfD inquiries. “Apart from insignificant inquiries and sensitive inquiries, there is also a huge gray area,” Henrichmann said. “And what I have regularly heard from various ministries is that individual inquiries are not really the problem. But when…
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expressed cautious optimism about the US-led peace talks, addressing that the majority of Kyiv’s demands have been met. Speaking to reporters in Kyiv, the Ukrainian leader described the peace deal as “quite solid at this stage,” with “nearly 90%” of its demands incorporated in the draft agreement, while acknowleding that compromises from both sides will be necessary. “There are some things we are probably not ready for, and I’m sure there are things the Russians are not ready for either,” Zelenskyy added. Washington has been going back and forth between talks with Kyiv and Moscow, in…
In the wake of Australia’s under-16 social media ban, launched earlier this month, European countries are grappling with whether they should implement similar restrictions. As of December 10, Australian children under 16 could no longer create or keep social media accounts on platforms such as Facebook, X, Threads, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, Reddit, and Google-owned YouTube. If these platforms are found to violate the law, they could face stiff penalties of 50 million Australian dollars (€28 million). So what are European nations doing to restrict social media for children online? We take a look at national measures that are either…
Even small-town alliances were enough to provoke nationwide outrage. A country haunted by its history of Nazi collaboration wasn’t going to accept candidates working with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front founder infamous for belittling the significance of the Holocaust. But the elder Le Pen is dead. His daughter and political heir rebranded the party as the National Rally and has, in little more than a decade, dragged it from the fringes of French politics to the top of most opinion polls. A country haunted by its history of Nazi collaboration wasn’t going to accept candidates working with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front founder infamous for belittling the significance of the Holocaust. | Alain Nogues/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images…
Ein turbulentes politisches Jahr 2025 neigt sich dem Ende zu. Von der vorgezogenen Neuwahl im Februar über die Zitterpartie bei der Kanzlerwahl von Friedrich Merz bis hin zu den ersten Auslandsreisen der neuen Regierung: In dieser Sonderfolge blickt ein Teil des POLITICO-Teams zurück. Rixa Fürsen, Pauline von Pezold, Gordon Repinski, Hans von der Burchard und Rasmus Buchsteiner erinnern sich an die Wahlpartys, die dramatischen Stunden vor der Kanzler-Vereidigung und warum der erste Trip nach Kiew fast an einer Taxifahrt gescheitert wäre.Sie erzählen, was es mit dem internen „Floskel-Schwein“ für die Siebträgermaschine auf sich hat, warum Hans von der Burchard die…
The felling of the “reparations loan” proposal, which would have recycled Russian assets that are mostly frozen in a clearing bank in Belgium, deprives Ukraine of guaranteed funding for the next two years. It was Belgium’s legal anxieties over the loan, along with French President Emmanuel Macron’s and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s reluctance to join German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in championing the proposal, that doomed it. And all that, despite weeks of wrangling and overblown expectations by the plan’s advocates, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Fortunately, the EU will still provide a sizable funding package for…