Category: Europe

A French court has jailed four Afghans and handed lesser sentences to five others for illegally smuggling migrants across the Channel to Britain on dinghies in 2021. London and Paris are clamping down on illicit boat crossings into the United Kingdom on the perilous route, which has been used by growing numbers of people since […]

Dozens of French railway workers set a bonfire outside Paris’ Gare de Lyon train station on Thursday as they started another day of strikes over President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular pension reform. France has been embroiled in weeks of demonstrations over the plans, which include raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. Thursday’s industrial action […]

American-made Patriot missiles have arrived in Ukraine, the country’s defense minister said Wednesday, providing Kiev with a long-sought new shield against the Russian airstrikes that have devastated cities and civilian infrastructure. The U.S. agreed in October to send the surface-to-air systems, which can target aircraft, cruise missiles and shorter-range ballistic missiles such as those that […]

Russia launched a drone attack on Ukraine’s southern port city of Odesa early Wednesday but there were no reports of casualties, authorities said. “At night, the enemy carried out an attack by UAVs of the Shahed-136 type on the Odesa region,” Yuriy Kruk, head of the Odesa district military administration, said in a statement on […]

The European Parliament voted Tuesday to allow visa-free visits to the EU for citizens of Kosovo, starting by the end of next year. Kosovo, once a Serbian province in the former Yugoslavia, is the last territory in the Western Balkans without visa-free travel to the EU’s Schengen travel area. The reform will be welcomed in […]

LONDON — With Turkey and Hungary continuing to block Sweden’s application to join the NATO military alliance, the Swedish government hopes for a swift ratification soon by both countries after Turkish elections scheduled for May 14. Sweden and Finland lodged a joint application to join NATO just weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February […]

Tens of thousands of workers in Norway began a strike on Monday, after negotiations between the country’s two main unions and employers’ representatives broke down late last night. Transport, hotel and construction sectors in the Nordic nation are all impacted by the strikes, with more than 22,000 workers from the main trade union confederation LO […]

BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA — Slovakia has delivered the remaining nine of the 13 Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter jets that it promised to Ukraine, the Slovak Defense Ministry said on Monday. The ministry said the warplanes were transported overland for security reasons in a “complicated logistics operation.” The first four were flown from Slovakia to Ukraine by Ukrainian […]

French President Emmanuel Macron has signed into law a controversial bill to raise the country’s retirement age by two years. The proclamation of the law came after France’s Constitutional Council on Friday approved the main retirement-age measure and follows months of protests against the reform, which the government forced through parliament without a final vote. […]

France’s Constitutional Council on Friday validated most of the government’s controversial pension reform, including its flagship measure of raising the legal retirement age to 64, while rejecting other measures, such as the creation of a “senior index”. At the same time, the Sages rejected a request for a shared initiative referendum (RIP) filed by the […]