Новости за 25.01.2016

EU member states are looking at legal ways to keep border controls in place for up to two years as the migration influx puts unprecedented pressure on the passport-free travel zone.

MEPs in a debate with Denmark's foreign minister and minister for migration remain largely unconvinced by a new Danish bill to seize assets from refugees.

Mykola Azarov is hoping the EU court will, on Thursday, strike him off the EU blacklist so that he can work, more easily, to unseat the government in Kiev.

EU interior ministers, meeting in Amsterdam on Monday, asked the European Commission to prepare the legal and practical basis for activating Article 26 of Schengen code in reaction to the current migrant crisis. The article authorises prolonged checks on the Schengen area's internal borders, of up to two years.

A Belgian court sentenced a Dutch man to five years in prison for membership of a terrorist organisation, broadcaster NOS reported. Two other people, assumed to be in Syria, were sentenced in absentia. The three were suspected of planning an attack in Brussels, but the court said evidence was lacking.

Academics from Oxford, Princeton, Harvard, Cornell and Copenhagen universities are drafting a submission to award the Nobel peace prize to the Greek people of Lesbos, Kos, Chios, Samos, Rhodes and Leros islands, who received over a million migrants in 2015. The nomination is also supported by an online petition.

The Islamic State group (IS) "is preparing more terrorist attacks" in the EU, particularly in France, Europol director Rob Wainwright said on Monday. According to AFP, he said attacks would be directed at "soft targets" and would be "Mumbai-style", referring to a large-scale killing and hostage-taking in India in 2008.

Greek officials reject mounting EU criticism of their leaky borders as a "blame game ... punishment," amid calls to expel Greece from the passport-free Schengen area.

"There is no plan to exclude Greece from the Schengen area," a European Commission spokeswoman told reporters Monday, after Austria threatened to move the area's borders "to central Europe". "Such a possibility doesn't exist under current rules," she said.

Portugal's election of centre-right Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa as president on Sunday will not affect the government "that much", EU commissioner Carlos Moedas has told journalists in Brussels. "The president has no executive role so there is no influence on day-to-day politics," said Moedas, from the same party as Sousa.

Two years after EU leaders made big promises on migration, following the Lampedusa tragedy, and their words still mean almost nothing in practice.

Abused by gangsters, disowned by their families, and let down by the state: Albanian women trafficked as sex slaves in Europe face an uphill battle to build new lives.

Croatia's new PM, Tihomir Oreskovic, raised in Canada with a background in business, presents his country with a unique chance to transform its government and economy.

A new wave of arrests against youth activists who, five years ago, helped bring down Mubarak is a sign of Sisi's paranoia, which could prompt fresh unrest.

Saeb Erekat, a leading Palestinian diplomat, has accused Martin Schulz, the European Parliament president, of endorsing Israel’s “apartheid” regime in the West Bank.

'The difficulties of forming a government could slow down the agenda of reforms', the Commission says in draft document, as coalition talks inch forward.

Austria's interior minister, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, wants Greece booted out of the passort-free Schengen zone unless it secures its, and the EU's, external borders.

Anti-government protests were held in about 40 towns and cities across Poland on Saturday over plans by the new conservative government to expand government access to digital data and allow for greater surveillance by police. The protesters say the measures will curtail privacy and freedom.

Russia said on Sunday it had shut its Arctic Storskog border post to Norway for "security reasons", following an announcement on Saturday by Norway that it was temporarily halting the return of migrants to Russia. Some 5,500 migrants crossed from Russia into Norway last year.

The EU's planned border patrol will be too small, Czech president Milos Zeman said on Prime TV Sunday. "It seems to me to be comical if it has 1,500 members. If every single EU country sent 500 people to this, then you have 14,000 soldiers," he said, Reuters reports.

The popularity of the Social Democratic Party of Sweden's prime minister Stefan Loefven has crashed to its lowest level since 1967, with an opinion poll on Sunday suggesting only 23.3% support. The Sifo poll was conducted at the height of a controversy surrounding foreign minister Margot Wallstroem’s Stockholm apartment.

Portugal elected ex-MEP Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, a former TV pundit from the centre-right Social Democratic Party, as president on Sunday with 52% of the vote. The post is largely ceremonial but could be key to maintaining political stability in a country with a fragile new government.