Free Republic

In an effort to stop migrants from crossing the Mediterranean, Austria's chancellor has said EU border patrol guards should be sent to northern Africa. Sebastian Kurz has made cracking down on immigration a priority.Frontex border control agents should be allowed to operate in northern Africa in order to prevent further migration to Europe, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said in an interview with German newspaper Welt am Sonntag,published on Sunday. Kurz's comments appeared to foreshadow the Austrian government's plans for when it takes over the EU Presidency for six months starting in July. Read more: Follow the money: What are the...

The Leeds Crown Court has issued a UK media ban following the arrest of well-known activist and citizen journalist [redacted] outside [redacted]. The reporting restriction, which requires on all publications within the United Kingdom to cease any mention of the details of the arrest or court proceedings of [redacted], was issued Friday afternoon: Redacted Shortly after the issuance of the press ban on the case, several media outlets, including Breitbart London, the Mirror, the Daily Record, Birmingham Mail, and the Russian state broadcaster Russia Today, complied with the restriction and removed articles concerning [redacted]’s case. Several other media outlets have...

Berlin is “determined to do everything necessary” to preserve the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran despite the US pullout, Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said while meeting US lawmakers at the start of his visit to Washington. “We don’t want any proliferation of nuclear weapons in our extended neighborhood,” Maas stressed. Having a deal, according to Maas, is better than not having one, and fearing that Iran would restart its uranium enrichment program. […] Earlier this month, Maas sharply criticized the US stance on Iran, calling it a “disappointment.” He added that Berlin was willing to “fight for our interests...

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, responded on to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech on Iran, in which he vowed that Washington would impose unprecedented sanctions against Tehran following its withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal. In a statement quoted by AFP, Mogherini warned that there is “no alternative” to the Iran nuclear deal. “Secretary Pompeo’s speech has not demonstrated how walking away from the JCPOA has made or will make the region safer from the threat of nuclear proliferation or how it puts us in a better position to influence Iran’s conduct in areas outside the...

Chancellor Angela Merkel visits China on Thursday, seeking to close ranks with the world’s biggest exporting nation as US President Donald Trump shakes up explosive issues from trade to Iran’s nuclear deal. Finding a common strategy to ward off a trade war and keep markets open will be Merkel’s priority when she meets with President Xi Jinping, as Washington brandishes the threat of imposing punitive tariffs on aluminium and steel imports. “Both countries are in agreement that open markets and rules-based world trade are necessary. That’s the main focus of this trip,” Merkel’s spokeswoman Martina Fietz said in Berlin on...

European Union Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced Thursday that the bloc plans to reactivate a law that would seek to block European companies from complying with any sanctions the US would reintroduce against Iran. Juncker’s announcement came during the second day of an EU meeting in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which had already been marked by sharp criticism from European leaders over American President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. […] German-headquartered insurance firm Allianz and Danish shopping company Maersk have already said they plan to close operations in Iran in order...

One in five Germans would like to see the monarchy restored, according to a survey released on Thursday. Young Germans were even keener on replacing the president with a new Kaiser. … Despite swelling support among the young, most Germans still oppose the idea. 51 percent of all respondents said that having a king or queen would cost too much money. Sixty nine percent said they were completely against the idea. …

Preparations are underway for the grand opening of the new United States embassy to Israel in Jerusalem. While the President won’t be able to attend as he prepares for his summit with North Korea, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have arrived to do the honors along with a number of other delegates. But not everyone is quite so thrilled with this development, particularly in some parts of the European Union. They were preparing to put forward a resolution condemning the embassy move, delivering a statement which was explicitly designed to “embarrass and isolate the Trump administration” ahead of the ceremony....

One unintended consequence of Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Iran nuclear agreement has been to bring Germany and Russia together again. German-Russian relations had soured because of alleged Russian cyberattacks and the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea. But the US President’s hardline policy on around the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) for Iran has intensified the search for common ground in Berlin and Moscow. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is scheduled to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi on May 18, and on Friday morning the two spoke on the telephone. “The importance of...

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas says Berlin is set to change its policy towards the US after Washington’s walkout on the Iran nuclear deal. In the comments published by the German Spiegel magazine on Friday, Maas addressed the diplomatic crisis that saw Donald Trump ignore the appeals of the USA’s European allies to keep the deal in place. While Germany intends to continue seeking cooperation with the US, Maas said his country would take a tougher stance towards Washington.“We are prepared to talk, negotiate and also fight for our interests where necessary,” Maas told Spiegel. “This goes for all levels,...

France’s President Emmanuel Macron urged Germany to take on the mantle as a leading force reforming Europe at a “historic moment” for the bloc, hours before he was due to receive a key award Thursday for his efforts in boosting EU cohesion. With Berlin so far proving resistant to his flagship reform proposals for the European Union such as a common finance minister or budget, Macron stressed the importance for the bloc to speak with one voice. At a time when the United States is going its own way in ditching the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord,...

Europe can no longer rely on the United States to protect it, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said today, urging the bloc to take its destiny in its own hands. "It is no longer such that the United States simply protects us, but Europe must take its destiny in its own hands, that's the task of the future," she said, after US President Donald Trump left traditional allies scrambling by ditching the landmark Iran nuclear deal.

Britain is backing a French plan to create a European military intervention force as a way to maintain strong defense ties with the EU after Brexit, a minister told AFP on Saturday. The British junior defense minister, Frederick Curzon, said London was “very keen to support” French President Emmanuel Macron’s plan for a force that could be deployed rapidly to deal with crises. The force, known as the European Intervention Initiative, would be separate from other EU defense cooperation, meaning there would be no obstacle to Britain taking part after it leaves the bloc. […] Twenty-five EU countries signed a...

German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen has put in a request for an increase to the military budget of €12 billion ($14.6 billion) over the current term of parliament, an amount greatly in excess of present budget plans, a newspaper reported on Sunday. The Bild am Sonntag said Finance Minister Olaf Scholz had so far foreseen an increase in defense spending of just €5.5 billion over the four years to 2021. The Defense Ministry had already criticized Scholz’s plan on Friday as “inadequate in view of the huge accumulated needs and required modernization, particularly in the medium term.” According...

The European Union and Mexico reached an agreement on Saturday on a new free trade deal, a coup for both parties in the face of increased protectionism from the United States under President Donald Trump. Since its plans for a trade alliance with the United States were frozen after Trump’s election victory, the EU has focused instead on trying to champion open markets and seal accords with other like-minded countries. The agreement in principle with Mexico follows a deal struck last year with Japan and comes ahead of talks next week with the Mercosur bloc of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and...

In Rheinland-Pfalz, Marx’s 200th birthday bash is bringing in a lot of capital. Whether the communist philosopher would have been down with this commerce is hard to say. Karl Marx was born on May 5th, 1818 in Trier, in what is now Rheinland-Palatinate. Many cities in the surrounding area are using the upcoming anniversary to gain big capital from multiple Marx-themed memorabilia, including a “zero-euro” bill introduced in March with the likeness of Karl Marx, who had a very distant relationship to money.The German thinker is known for being the father of modern Communism, with groundbreaking works such as Capital—A...

US President Donald Trump “will not succeed” in dividing European nations against one another over trade, German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier warned on Sunday ahead of a visit to Washington. In the European Union “we are a customs union and act collectively. It cannot be in the interest of the US government to divide Europe, nor will it succeed,” Altmaier told German business daily Handelsblatt. […] “Companies and consumers on both sides would foot the bill if the US and Europe tumble into a trade war,” Altmaier said. Meanwhile, countries like China that stand accused of flooding global markets with...

The EU is set to hit a wide range of American products — ranging from yachts to peanut butter — with duties of 25 percent to retaliate against President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum. The products targeted, as shown in a list obtained by Politico, are chosen so as not to harm EU industries, which do not need these imports. Some targets clearly gun for politically sensitive Republican-run states. […] In agriculture, the EU will go after kidney beans, bourbon whiskey, rice, cranberries, orange juice, peanut butter, tobacco and cheroots. […] In the industrial sector, the...

The German government warned Monday that a transatlantic trade war would harm both Europe and the US, urging Washington not to take a “wrong path” after a weekend of aggressive trade rhetoric. “I don’t want to judge how close to or far from a trade war we are. Such a trade war would not be in German, European or American interests,” Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters in Berlin. However, “closing oneself off and protectionism are the wrong path,” Seibert added, after President Donald Trump at the weekend threatened to impose tariffs on car imports from the European...

Her eurosceptic rhetoric sounds a lot like that of former Ukip leader Nigel Farage, even telling of her admiration for the 53-year-old’s Brexit campaign as she told supporters to “take their country back”. She said: “I look at Nigel Farage’s example. It took 17 years, but Brexit came. “I don’t plan to wait that long.” She claims the EU has turned “Finland into its province” and has railed against the country’s political elite, who she argues do not represent the working class.