Cancelling due to Ben Gvir’s presence is just the newest hypocrisy. Europe celebrates with dictators, but boycotts democratic Israel.
“The ambassadors of the European Union member states present in Qatar are pleased to invite you to a special event to celebrate Europe Day in Qatar”. And again: “Every year, on May 9, we celebrate the Schuman declaration. The EU ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Patrick Simonnet, has organized a lunch to celebrate Europe Day in Riyadh”. Same invitation in Türkiye.
Chinese government appears interested in pulling EU away from US, when Biden administration has sought to shore up allies to counter Beijing
China’s muted response to the historic meeting of Tsai Ing-wen, the Taiwanese president, with Kevin McCarthy, the US House speaker, comes as Beijing prioritises a flurry of diplomatic activity aimed at its wider efforts to lure the European Union and other nations away from the United States.
Ms Tsai’s meeting was the highest-level government reception for a Taiwanese leader on US soil in decades, and one that China protested in advance.
BRUSSELS — European leaders are suddenly falling over each other to get to China.
Amid growing concern that Chinese leader Xi Jinping is hardening his support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced on Thursday he will fly to Beijing for talks next week. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, will follow on a longer-planned trip on April 4.
A succession of European Union leaders used a summit in Brussels to raise the alarm about China’s ostentatious backing for Vladimir Putin this week, warning that they could not stand by while Beijing and Moscow cement an alliance that risks tipping the world deeper into crisis.
China is supporting Russia in its war with Ukraine did the EURO’s not get the message?
It’s bad enough the Liberal Party and our Corporate elite has sold Canada out to Communist China but it appears the majority of our NATO allies are also turncoats.
Young people in three European countries are sharply critical of the world’s two most powerful countries, a study has found.
They are concerned about the US’s role as the “world’s policeman” and China’s growing economic might, says US-based Pew Research Center.
The findings are based on focus groups with some 120 adults aged 18-29 in the UK, France and Germany.
Participants were from across the ideological spectrum.
Many voiced concerns about how the US has wielded its power on the global stage and criticised its actions abroad as self-interested.
BRUSSELS — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the greatest challenge to European security since the end of the Cold War, but the Europeans have missed the opportunity to step up their own defense, diplomats and experts say. Instead, the war has reinforced Europe’s military dependence on the United States.
Washington, they note, has led the response to the war, marshaled allies, organized military aid to Ukraine and contributed by far the largest amount of military equipment and intelligence to Ukraine. It has decided at each step what kind of weapons Kyiv will receive and what it will not.
Europe has been warned that a flood of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has killed more than 100,000 people in the United States, is heading this way.
Belgium is on the front line of the new drugs war, as the main entry point for narcotics arriving from Latin America, and its customs chief says fentanyl is a bigger threat than heroin or cocaine.
A string of drug raids that seized small quantities of fentanyl in Europe over recent months has raised fears that the drug, 50 times more powerful than heroin, has arrived in Europe, as
Mexican cartels seek to build a new market on the Continent. The highly addictive opioid has ravaged the US, driving overdose deaths to 110,236 last year.
MONTREAL — If personal affinity shaped the geopolitical world emerging from the pandemic, Canada and the European Union would be bosom buddie.
But it is more likely the two will be rivals in a beggar thy neighbour regional subsidy war that is brewing between North America and Europe.
It is enough to visit a maternity ward, primary school or playground in a large city to see that Europe’s farewell has taken place.
“From a demographic point of view, Europe seems to be on a path that could lead it to leave history”, said Benedict XVI in 2007, while his secretary Georg Gänswein evoked the “danger of the Islamization of Europe”.
Three years earlier, while cardinal, Ratzinger had explained that “Europe seems to have become empty from within, paralyzed by a crisis in its circulatory system which puts its life at risk, entrusted, so to speak, to transplants, which however then cannot but erase his identity”.
In the past few days the news that Mohammed is the second most popular name among newborns in all of Holland (it has been first in the four main cities for years), the first name in England, the first in Berlin, the first in Oslo, the first in Malmö, first in Brussels, third in Vienna… The Welt informs us about Germany: “Even in Dortmund the first is the name of the Prophet, as in Duisburg and Essen…”.
The case for the EU has always been based on fear, deception and an exaggerated sense of declinism.
We joined, we voted to stay, we voted to leave, we left. This year’s 50th anniversary of Britain’s accession to the then Common Market seems a good moment for another look at this half-century detour, marked by persistent collective uncertainty about whether we wanted to join ‘Europe’, stay in it or leave it. Throughout, our national responses have been marked by three things: ‘declinism’, deception (including self-deception) and fear.
EU leaders are reconsidering their approach to Russia
Warmer-than-average temperatures may have spared Europe from the worst effects of the energy crisis, but that is about to change: with temperatures predicted to plummet in the coming weeks, heightened demand for dwindling (and very expensive) supplies of natural gas will seriously test Europe’s fragile energy networks — potentially to breaking point.
In Germany, the Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance recently issued a near-apocalyptic advisory telling people what to expect in the event of a blackout: “The telephone is dead, the heating doesn’t come on, there is no warm water, the computer goes on strike, the coffee machine stays off, there is no light.” The agency urged households to stock up on battery-powered flashlights and candles, and even suggested camp stoves to prepare small meals. Elsewhere in Europe, governments are preparing food distribution networks that can function through a blackout.
BERLIN — On a balmy September evening last year, an Azeri man carrying a Russian passport crossed the border from northern Cyprus into southern Cyprus. He traveled light: a pistol, a handful of bullets and a silencer.
It was going to be the perfect hit job.
Then, just as the man was about to step into a rental car and carry out his mission — which prosecutors say was to gun down five Jewish businessmen, including an Israeli billionaire — the police surrounded him.
In the new Cold War economy, trade will be restricted, technology fenced off, and intellectual property fiercely protected. Manufacturing capabilities will be built up, and supply chains brought closer to home to ensure resilience whatever happens.
As relations between the West and China deteriorate sharply, every developed economy will have to pick a side. And it is already becoming clear which one the major powers of Europe – and the European Union itself – have chosen. China.
Over the last few weeks, we have seen example after example of major industrial and commercial ties with China deepening.
Worth your while to read this, likely indicates Junior’s leanings as well. The extent of business being done with China is eye opening.
As usual America provides protection in the Ukraine while Europe (and Canada) enjoy a free ride. That can’t last.
It reinforces my own suspicions that the USA was behind the NordStream pipeline sabotage.
Gotta keep those reluctant “allies” in line.
The time is long overdue for American officials to put the American people first.
Is Europe threatened or not?
For months, the United Kingdom has been leading the charge against Russia over Ukraine. When serving as foreign secretary, Liz Truss, recently ousted as prime minister, hired a Beatles tribute band to lobby Secretary of State Antony Blinken to take a tougher stand toward Moscow. Then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson even more ostentatiously played uber-hawk when visiting Ukraine, mimicking Winston Churchill, about whom Johnson wrote a biography. London’s message appeared to be “Follow Me!”
It’s been a big week for Josep Borrell, the European Union’s most senior diplomat. In two historic, borderline apocalyptic speeches this week, Borrell laid out a stark vision of Europe’s threatened place in a world of growing insecurity and competition between states, grappling with a reality the continent’s leaders have until now been too slow — perhaps fatally slow — to apprehend.
The price of gas from the Middle East is high – in the long term.
“Gas as a holy war. Gas as a new fantasy of revenge on the West. It is the ‘gift of Allah’. There is a desire for conquest “. So writes with irony Kamel Daoud, the celebrated Algerian writer, in the French weekly Le Point.
Saudi Arabia (which is also financing the first mosque in Cuba at the moment) was the first stop on a recent tour of the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz which included the Emirates and Qatar.
