Новости за 27.10.2021

The US is planning to add Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Romania to its visa-waiver programme, letting people stay for up to 90 days without a permit. "We have four candidates in the pipeline: Israel, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania," homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Tuesday, Reuters reports. "Each time you add one of these countries, travel just booms," a US tourism-association chief said. All other 24 EU states already have waivers.

"Granting certification [to Russia's new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline] is not threatening security of gas supply to the Federal Republic of Germany and the European Union," Germany's economy ministry said Tuesday, in a recommendation to energy regulator Bundesnetzagentur. The regulator has until January to decide, but may act earlier, amid accusations Russia was manipulating supply to enable it to run the pipe as a monopoly despite EU anti-monopoly laws.

The EU should force US firm Facebook to change its ways even if litigation took "years without end", European anti-trust chief Margrethe Vestager told DW Tuesday. Facebook posed a risk to "young people's mental health" as well as "democracy" and needed external regulators, she said. Legal action should also try to help "smaller businesses ... get full access to the market" which Facebook has dominated, Vestager added.

The UK launched a major search-and-rescue operation Tuesday for three migrants missing in the English Channel after finding two others whose boat went off-course, The Times reports. Over 20,000 people crossed the Channel so far this year, including 145 on Tuesday. The UK is currently drafting new laws that will give its coast guard legal immunity if people drown after their boats are pushed back toward France by British vessels.

Israel on Tuesday signed up to the EU's next Horizon science programme, worth €96bn from 2021-2027, with its foreign minister Yair Lapid saying the move "positions Israel as a central player in the largest and most important research and development programme in the world". Horizon's terms forbid Israel from spending EU money in Israeli facilities on occupied Palestinian territories, amid EU concern, repeated Monday, about ongoing Israeli settlement expansion.

"The early detections of the A (H3N2) subtype are an indication that the upcoming flu season could be severe, although we cannot know for sure," Pasi Penttinen, an expert at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said Tuesday. Elderly people, pregnant women, and those with chronic illnesses were most at risk, while health-care providers were already at breaking point due to the pandemic, the EU agency added.

A Dutch court has said the Ukrainian state should take custody of ancient gold artefacts from Russia-occupied Crimea, instead of four museums on the annexed peninsula, who tried get them back from the Netherlands' Allard Pierson Museum, where they were loaned in 2014. "After the 'Scythian gold', we'll return Crimea," Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky said. Russia did not comment. Tuesday's decision can still be appealed at the Dutch Supreme Court.

Some 73 percent of Poles said Warsaw should back down in its rule-of-law dispute with Brussels in a survey by IBRiS for the Rzeczpospolita newspaper Tuesday, even as Russian media had a field day with Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki's recent anti-EU interview in the Financial Times. The Izvestia and Lenta newspapers said he had warned of "a Third World War over the EU", while RT praised Morawiecki's "great words".

Environment ministers and representatives sought - and failed to find - common ground, following the gridlocked summit of EU leaders, on solutions to rising energy prices.

Sweden's centre-right MEP Tomas Tobe is steering the core bill on migration and asylum through the European Parliament. But his draft proposal has been met with resistance from liberal left leaning MEPs, possibly creating another political deadlock.

The commission vice-president Vera Jourova highlighted Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and France - where developments in the media market have caused concern, and admitted the "state of the media in EU is not good".

EU institutions and states abdicated their responsibilities for search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean, deputising Libya to take their place, withdrawing naval assets from high-seas corridors, and obstructing, even criminalising, NGO groups, writes the European director of Human Rights Watch.

A commitment to fighting racism cannot go hand in hand with 'Fortress Europe' policies which demonise black, brown and Muslim refugees and migrants or with rights violations linked to Frontex pushbacks.