Author: staff

ROME — Italy’s contentious migrant detention centers in Albania are now ready and operational, the Italian ambassador to Tirana said Friday, after months of delays and logistical setbacks. Under the 2023 deal, Tirana agreed that Italy could send up to 36,000 male migrants who have been stopped in international waters each year to two asylum-processing centers in northern Albania. Rights groups and opposition politicians have called the deal “dehumanizing” and “illegal,” warning that diverting migrants to an extra-territorial location, run by private contractors, will obscure them from scrutiny, weakening oversight of conditions and increasing the violations of basic rights. Federica…

A widely-seen social media post claims that child poverty in the UK is significantly higher than in the Nordic countries. However, the numbers don’t appear to tell the truth. A social media post with almost 200,000 views claims that more than 30% of children in the UK live in poverty.It compares that figure to Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which supposedly have child poverty rates between 2% and 4%.However, the post is misleading: while there are more children in poverty in the UK than in the Nordics, the numbers have been inflated.This is because the post uses data from about…

PARIS — French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi said on Friday that it was in talks to sell a majority stake of its subsidiary that produces over-the-counter drugs to an American private equity firm CD&R for €15 billion. The proposed takeover is already proving highly controversial in France, with politicians from across political spectrum voicing fears it could threaten manufacturing jobs in France and fall afoul of Europe’s push to secure its supply chains for critical medicines. Mere hours after Sanofi announced that it was in talks to sell the subsidiary, Opella, as part of its push to focus on vaccines and…

BRUSSELS — Politics is stuck in traffic. Ahead of municipal elections in Brussels on Sunday, a feud between the capital’s French and Dutch-speaking parties is threatening to unravel a delicate political compromise needed to govern the city. At the heart is a clash over a plan to cut car pollution. The tipping point came earlier this month when local lawmakers voted to delay tighter pollution limits for cars driving into the traffic-clogged Belgian capital that were originally due to take effect in January. A French-speaking majority passed the decision, brushing aside a Dutch-speaking minority and triggering an impasse in ongoing…

Anti-nuclear weapon campaigners have been honoured in the past by the Nobel Committee. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to a Japanese group of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for its activism against nuclear weapons.Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the award to Nihon Hidankyo was made as the “taboo against the use of nuclear weapon is under pressure.”The Nobel committee “wishes to honour all survivors who, despite physical suffering and painful memories, have chosen to use their costly experience to cultivate hope and engagement for peace,” he added.The organisation, whose…

This article was originally published in Farsi Under Brussels’ sanctions against Tehran, most of some 60,000 Iranian truckers who traverse Europe’s roads each month to transit various goods are either homeless or have been hit hard by paying exorbitant fees for crossing into the bloc. The imposition of a state insurance embargo on Iran by EU member states has added to the difficulty of obtaining visas for Iranian truck drivers traversing European routes — so much so that their jobs, which had been on the decline since the beginning of last year, almost became extinct.While Germany and Italy were Iranian drivers’…

Chinese online marketplace Temu will have until 21 October to answer European Commission questions on illegal products under the Digital Services Act (DSA). Chinese online marketplace Temu was asked on Friday to provide more information on the measures it has taken against traders selling illegal products on its platform under the EU’s online platform rules, the European Commission announced today.The company will also need to give additional data and information on the measures it has adopted to mitigate the risk of the spread of illegal products, as well as risks related to consumer protection, public health and users’ wellbeing, the…

A new report reveals that the BFI, the UK’s most influential movie funding body, had “badly handled” the long-running discrimination complaint made by filmmaker Faisal Qureshi. British Film Institute CEO Ben Roberts has issued an apology to a prominent filmmaker of colour, after an independent investigation – which coincides with the BFI London Film Festival – concluded that the BFI “badly” mishandled his racial discrimination complaint.Verita, the complaints reviewer for National Lottery-funded organizations, concluded that the BFI had “badly handled” the long-running discrimination complaint made by Faisal Qureshi, the producer behind the BAFTA-winning film Four Lions and HBO’s Emmy-winning Michael…

The EU executive recently carried out an urgent review to ensure its funding to the Palestinian territories was not inadvertently falling into the hands of militant groups. The leader of France’s far-right National Rally and MEP Jordan Bardella claimed before the Strasbourg plenary on Monday that “European public funds” were “indirectly fuelling the Hamas terrorist movement”.Responding to Bardella’s comments in the chamber, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell said: “If you have the slightest proof that European funds have been reaching Hamas, I as vice-president of the European Commission demand that you share them. And if you don’t,…

The EU is helping Turkey forcibly deport migrants to Syria and Afghanistan European taxpayers finance ill-treatment and forced expulsion, an investigation found. By ZIA WEISE, MOHANNAD AL-NAJJAR, MAY BULMAN, ANDRES MOURENZA and GIACOMO ZANDONINI in Brussels Illustrations by Tamsin Gaul for POLITICO One of the last things Sami saw before Turkey deported him was the flag of the European Union.  This spring, the 26-year-old Syrian was beaten unconscious at the gates of an EU-funded detention site in southern Turkey, stuffed into a bus and sent back to the war zone he had escaped from years earlier.  In the detention center,…