Free Republic

STRASBOURG, France - The EU budget chief said the bloc needs to invest dedicated funds to avert a “climate crash” as Brussels detailed how it planned to pay for a trillion euro push to cut net C02 emissions to zero by 2050 and protect member countries dependent on coal. “We need climate cash in order to avoid a climate crash,” European Budget Commissioner Johannes Hahn told Reuters on Tuesday. Of the 1 trillion euros of the EU’s 10-year investment plan, roughly half is to come from the EU long-term budget, the Commission said. This will trigger more than 100 billion...

Eric Ciaramella, whom Real Clear Investigations suggests is the likely so-called whistleblower, received emails about Ukraine policy from a top director at George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The emails informed Ciaramella and a handful of other Obama administration foreign policy officials about Soros’s whereabouts, the contents of Soros’s private meetings about Ukraine and a future meeting the billionaire activist was holding with the prime minister of Ukraine. A primary recipient of the Open Society emails along with Ciaramella was then-Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who played a central role in the anti-Trump dossier affair. Nuland, with...

The European Union announced on Thursday it would commit a further €20 million ($23 million) to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in 2019, i24news reports. This will bring the EU’s contribution to €153 million, which is in line with how much the US contributed to the UN agency for “Palestinian refugees” in 2017. The United States, the largest single contributor to UNRWA, announced in August that it would end its $350 million a year funding for the agency, describing the organization as an “irredeemably flawed operation”. That announcement followed a previous US announcement in January that it...

The EU has completed the biggest photovoltaic solar field in Gaza, the European Commission announced on Thursday. The field will provide 0.5 Megawatts of electricity per day to fuel the Southern Gaza Desalination Plant. The EU-funded Southern Gaza Desalination Plant currently provides drinking water to 75,000 inhabitants in the Khan Younis and Rafah governorates. With the new energy field and new investments foreseen it will eventually reach 250,000 people in Southern Gaza by 2020. Johannes Hahn, EU Commissioner for European Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, commented, “Limited energy supplies in Gaza are one of the main challenges when improving access...