Новости за 13.07.2020

The presidential vote split the country into two, with incumbent president Andrzej Duda emerging victorious after a campaign laced with homophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Cyprus, Egypt, France and Greece of trying to marginalise his country in the eastern Mediterranean and seize its rights over hydrocarbon reserves, Ekathimerini reported. "We do not want tension in the Mediterranean, the cradle of different civilisations through history. We believe that hydrocarbon resources in the region can offer opportunities to the entire region," Erdogan said in an interview with Turkish magazine Kriter.

Nearly 61 percent of Germans would be willing to be vaccinated against Covid-19, according to a new survey. This represents a decline in comparison to April, when 74 percent of the participants in Germany, the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, France and Portugal said they would get vaccinated. The survey polled 7,000 people in several member states in April and June, German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported on Sunday.

The German government has said the EU should impose sanctions on Russian hackers responsible for the cyberattack on the Bundestag in 2015, dpa reported Sunday. If agreed, this could be the first use of the EU cyber sanctions scheme adopted in 2017. Some 16 gigabytes of data, documents, and emails were stolen from the Bundestag's network, including thousands of emails from Angela Merkel's office.

UK cabinet office minister Michael Gove announced on Sunday a €788m investment for new border posts, improved technology and extra staff to guarantee the well-functioning of checks and controls at the British border from January. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Gove said that the funding will make British borders "the world's most effective border by 2025" and ready for "full independence" when the Brexit transition period concludes on 1 January.

Bulgaria's socialist president, Roumen Radev, has called on the country's conservative prime minister, Boïko Borissov, to resign amidst continuing anti-corruption protests, Le Monde writes. Since 7 July angry protesters have gathered on a beach in the bay of Burgas, at the Black Sea, to denounce the alleged corruption of Ahmed Dogan, the wealthy former leader of the Turkish minority party, which supports the government of Borissov.

Croatia is defying the EU travel ban on US residents and has opened its borders to American tourists as well as to business travellers, Forbes reports. The US embassy in Croatia announced the new measure stating that on top of EU citizens "all other foreign nationals, including US citizens, may enter Croatia for business, tourism, or other pressing personal reasons, if they provide relevant proof."

Pope Francis has said he's "pained" by Turkey's decision to convert Istanbul's Hagia Sophia back into a mosque, while the leader of the Turkish community in Germany, Gökay Sofuoglu, called it a "wrong decision" and said the world would lose a symbol of harmony. Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced Muslim prayers would begin on 24 July, for the first time since the Hagia Sophia became a museum in 1934.

France and the UK on Sunday signed an agreement to create a joint migrant intelligence unit to crack down on people attempting to cross the channel onto the island-nation. "It's very important that our British friends realise that if the migrants come here in Calais, it's not for the beauty of the city but it's to cross the Channel," said French interior minister Gerald Darmanin.

EU leaders will meet in Brussels on Friday and Saturday to discuss in person the EU's long-term budget and recovery plan to respond to the crisis. Meanwhile, the future of the EU-US Privacy Shield might depend on this week's ruling.

We call for applying positive discrimination to the 'Blue Book'. This would imply quotas to ensure the recruitment of people of colour including those from non-privileged backgrounds.

My group in the European Parliament, Renew Europe, has just adopted a position paper that highlights our views on SMEs.

The south-eastern EU member state has seen a week of record new coronavirus cases, plus a row in a kebab shop over masks with two MPs.