Europa / Europe and the EU + EEA
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Hungarian and CEE “Peace” Movements Serve the Kremlin’s Interests.
vsquare.org Hungarian and CEE “Peace” Movements Serve the Kremlin’s Interests - VSquare.orgKremlin's recalibration of far-right and far-left influence networks across Europe under the guise of “peace” has become a powerful tool
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A European Citizens Initiative wants to introduce a Wealth Tax (and they need your help)
www.tax-the-rich.eu Tax The RichNous voulons un impôt européen sur les grandes fortunes pour financer la transition climatique et sociale et aider les pays victimes des dérèglements climatiques.
cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/14261109
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This community is moving to feddit.org/c/europa. This sub on Lemmyworld will be sunset in the coming weeks. Please update your subscriptions.
The main Fediverse community for Europe is located at [email protected] - please don’t submit many new posts to this sub on Lemmyworld. We are considering the board to be sunset and in a transition period for the next few weeks, after which it will be locked for new posts. Thanks.
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Negotiators seal EU top jobs deal for von der Leyen, Costa and Kallas | Euronews
www.euronews.com Negotiators seal EU top jobs deal for von der Leyen, Costa and KallasDespite the reported deal, the decision will not become official until the 27 leaders gather in a summit later this week. #EuropeNews
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2024 Oslo Freedom Forum Videos
Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF) is a series of global conferences run by the New York–based non-profit Human Rights Foundation under the slogan "Challenging Power". The forum aims to bring together notable people, including former heads of state, winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, prisoners of conscience, as well as of other public figures in order to network and exchange ideas about human rights and exposing dictatorships.
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Any reason to have this community compared to [email protected]?
Basically, title.
[email protected] is well established, on a clearly European instance, and with active moderators (shoutout to @[email protected] )
In this context, why split discussions between [email protected] and here?
For people curious about feddit.de recent issues, this post on [email protected] clarifies the next steps: https://lemmy.world/post/16420574
In summary, people are getting organized to manage the handover from the current admin to the new organization (kind of a similar process to what happened to feddit.uk some time ago)
Of course, I'm not saying that other "europe" communities shouldn't exist. [email protected] is a community that follows lemmy.ml political stance, and [email protected] is a more laid back community. But for a general news-focused Europe community, [email protected] seems like a solid choice for now.
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Chat control vote postponed
www.patrick-breyer.de Chat control vote postponed: Huge success in defense of digital privacy of correspondence!Today EU governments will not adopt their position on the EU regulation on “combating child sexual abuse”, the so-called chat control regulation, as planned, which would have heralded the end of private messages and secure encryption. The Belgian Council presidency postponed the vote at short notice
- www.theguardian.com Owner of UK national lottery operator to sever ties with Gazprom
Allwyn parent company says deal to buy 3% stake in Czech gas facility will cut final link with Kremlin-controlled energy firm
- www.theguardian.com Russian crime group behind London hospitals cyber-attack, says expert
Ex-head of National Cyber Security Centre says group has ‘two-year history of attacking organisations across the world’
- www.theguardian.com Disinformation crisis unit on rapid alert around European elections
EU officials anticipate ‘narratives questioning the legitimacy of the elections’ for weeks afterwards
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Beyond failing forward? The Euro at 25
adamtooze.substack.com Chartbook 260 Beyond failing forward? The Euro at 25 (Part 1)The euro is not in the headlines. On the 25th anniversary of the first moves to irrevocably fix the exchange rates of the major European economies this lack of notice is good news. For too much of its history Europe’s common currency has lived under the shadow of alarmist speculation about its futur...
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MEPs to propose ending geo-blocking of films and series in the EU
Yesterday, the traditionally highly conservative legal affairs committee voted to end geo-blocking of films and series in some limited contexts. It's a tectonic shift from the previous position of the legal affairs committee, and comes ahead of today's vote in the more progressive Internal Market & Consumer protection, where MEPs will call for a gradual abolition of geo-blocking.
- www.ft.com Extreme renting: Amsterdam’s two-tier system pits tenants against landlords | Financial Times
Renters challenge high prices for poor-quality properties as owners pass on interest rate rises and battle regulations
- www.hrw.org Poland: Abortion Witch Hunt Targets Women, Doctors
Poland’s government is targeting people for alleged abortion-related activities, intensifying a climate of fear that heightens risks for women and girls. The government’s dubious use of its powers to chase down alleged abortion-related activity threatens people’s rights to privacy, autonomy, and hea...
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In Poland, Testing Women for Abortion Drugs Is a Reality. It Could Happen Here.
www.nytimes.com Opinion | In Poland, Testing Women for Abortion Drugs Is a Reality. It Could Happen Here.In rare cases, tests are being used to investigate the outcomes of pregnancies in a country where abortion is effectively banned.
Article without paywall: https://archive.ph/ZA7x9
Nearly three years ago, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal effectively ended legal abortion in the country. Since then, the Polish government has vigorously repressed the nation’s reproductive rights movement and ramped up surveillance of women who are suspected of terminating their pregnancies. Authorities have violently dispersed demonstrations, threatened activists with prison time and ordered doctors to record all pregnancies in a new national database.
Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer, Poland’s draconian crackdown, which was spearheaded by the governing right-wing Law and Justice party, should have been alarming to American supporters of abortion rights. It was always possible that some aspects of what has happened there could happen here.
Now there are reports that laboratory tests to detect abortion drugs have not only been created in Poland but are, in rare cases, also being used there to investigate the outcomes of pregnancies. These tests are not yet known to be in use anywhere else in the world. But Americans would be wise to plan for the possibility that the technology could one day be adopted on this side of the Atlantic and used by law enforcement to suss out whether women have taken abortion pills — which are now banned or restricted in more than two dozen states.
Women in both Poland and the United States have increasingly relied on informal networks for access to mifepristone and misoprostol, the drugs typically used in a medication abortion. In both countries, women can easily find information online and via telephone hotlines about how to use them to safely self-manage an abortion. That information often includes tips for protecting yourself from being targeted by law enforcement, as has already happened to some women who took abortion pills or were suspected of doing so.
For years, reproductive rights advocates have assured American women that when these medications are taken by mouth, a doctor cannot determine whether they were taken to induce an early abortion because the symptoms are indistinguishable from a miscarriage and because the drugs don’t show up on toxicology screens.
But Polish scientists claim they’ve devised laboratory methods to detect both mifepristone and misoprostol in biological specimens, and a spokeswoman for the regional prosecutor’s office in Wroclaw confirmed that these tests have been used in Poland to investigate pregnancy outcomes.
In a paper published last October in the journal Molecules, a group of researchers at Wroclaw Medical University’s Department of Forensic Medicine and the Institute of Toxicology Research in Poland described a technique for detecting misoprostol acid, a substance produced by the metabolism of misoprostol, in tissue taken from the placenta and the fetal liver. Weeks later, they published a second paper describing the development of a “rapid, sensitive and reliable method” to detect the other abortion drug, mifepristone, in maternal blood. The studies were conducted as part of a state-funded research project started in 2022.
The researchers, one of whom identifies as pro-choice, wrote that they developed these tests in part out of concern that the availability of abortion pills on the black market poses a public health threat. But it is difficult to see how this form of testing has medical or public health value, given the well-documented safety and efficacy of abortion pills. In effect, it seems strictly punitive — to harass and intimidate people who self-manage their abortions and to collect evidence about anyone who helped them get pills. Under Polish law, women cannot be prosecuted for taking abortion pills, but you can go to jail for helping someone else get them.
Last March, a court in Warsaw found a human rights activist guilty of just that. Justyna Wydrzynska, a co-founder of the Abortion Dream Team, a Polish abortion rights group, was sentenced to eight months of community service for providing abortion pills to a woman in an abusive relationship.
That conviction, the first of its kind in Europe, brings to mind the situation in El Salvador, where abortion is banned under all circumstances, including when the pregnant person’s life or health is in danger, and in cases of rape. Women who suffer miscarriages and stillbirths in El Salvador are sometimes accused of homicide and sentenced to years or even decades in prison.
Now that Roe has been overturned, U.S. abortion-rights advocates are bracing for cases like these to become increasingly common in America. A small but growing group of abortion “abolitionists” are calling for women who get abortions to be charged with murder and criminally punished — even put to death. Some Republican lawmakers are listening; this year alone, more than half a dozen states have introduced legislation that would classify abortion as homicide, a strategy experts believe could gain greater support should others fail. One such existing effort: a serious legal challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s nearly 25-year-old approval of mifepristone that threatens access to the drug across the country. (In mid-August, a federal appeals court panel upheld mifepristone’s approval but with significant restrictions on patients’ access to the drug. The ruling cannot go into effect until the Supreme Court weighs in.)
Amid these concerns, reproductive rights activists need to prepare for the possibility that testing for abortion drugs could happen here, too. Even the threat of such a test could have dire consequences for reproductive health, deepening distrust of the medical establishment and discouraging people from seeking care. Should prosecutors in Poland inspire copycats in American states, no health care provider should enable or support such a move.
The testing methods developed at Wroclaw employ what’s called tandem mass spectrometry, a sophisticated analytical technique regarded as the gold standard for the detection and quantification of chemical compounds in biological material. For decades, the significant cost of mass spectrometers and the technical knowledge needed to maintain and service the machines confined them to highly specialized laboratories. But as the technology has evolved, experts say, it’s become easier to use and far more accessible.
Almost every toxicology lab that supports a coroner’s office or medical examiner’s office in the United States “has several of these instruments, specifically for the purpose of finding drugs and drug metabolites in biological tissues of all kinds,” said Dr. Glen P. Jackson, a professor of forensic and investigative science at West Virginia University. “There are also many labs that work alongside emergency wards to identify poisons and toxins and drugs used in overdoses.” It would be “really quite easy,” he said, for any of them to develop methods similar to those described in these papers.
“There’s the potential for these tools to do a lot of good,” said Nicholas Manicke, a professor of chemistry and forensic science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Dr. Manicke’s research focuses on making mass spectrometry simpler and easier to use for things like cancer research, organ transplantation, screening for explosives at airports and identifying contaminants in food. “But given the political climate, they’re also ripe for use by opponents of abortion.”
Drug testing in clinical settings in the United States is largely unregulated, and the decision-making at individual facilities is often opaque. Michele Goodwin, a law professor at Georgetown University, has documented the dangers of doctors and nurses having discretionary power to interpret state statutes and report their patients to law enforcement. Ms. Goodwin writes in her book, “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood,” how a visit to a doctor’s office or hospital can double as a criminal investigation, leading to arrest and prosecution under a wide range of laws that purport to protect fetuses.
While most such laws preclude bringing charges against the pregnant woman, overzealous prosecutors have nevertheless done so.
Testing for abortion drugs is just the latest effort by the Polish government to enforce a stringent law. It’s a perversion of science for political ends and a possible preview of what awaits us in America’s post-Roe future.
- www.socialeurope.eu ECB president Lagarde: has she become unstoppable?
Asserting the need for further interest rate rises, Peter Bofinger writes, is not the same as evidencing them.
- www.thelocal.de Why is Germany seeing fewer immigrants from other EU countries?
Germany is seeing fewer immigrants from within the EU than before the pandemic, according to new figures from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf). Why have the numbers of EU migrants dropped so dramatically?
- apnews.com European Union lawmakers back a major plan to protect nature and fight climate change
The European Union’s parliament has narrowly backed a major plan to protect nature and fight climate change.
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Turkey will back Sweden's NATO membership bid
www.bbc.co.uk Turkey will back Sweden's Nato membership - StoltenbergThe Nato chief says President Erdogan will drop opposition to Sweden becoming the alliance's 32nd member.
Erdogan has pledged to allow Sweden to join, according to Stoltenberg. This is big, it means that now Austria and Ireland are the only EU member states not part of NATO.
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Newest European space telescope just launched!
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/4/23783648/euclid-space-telescope-esa-dark-matter-dark-energy-explain
- arstechnica.com Europe’s venerable Ariane 5 rocket faces a bittersweet ending on Tuesday
After nearly three decades, the Ariane 5 rocket reaches the end of the line.
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European Citizens' Initiative for high-speed train connections between European capitals
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1443305
> The European Commission is obliged to commit to our goal of connecting European capitals by high-speed rail if we collect at least 1,000,000 signatures of EU citizens. Make the Commission work for you and your country, for a better developed and comfortable Europe and sign the initiative.
> Do you want the European Commission to commit to this goal and help for our better common future? Support our European Citizens’ Initiative by signing [and sharing] the initiative.
Roughly quoted from https://www.connect-capitals-hsr.eu/
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European public consultation: "Have your say"
Citizens and businesses can share their views on new EU policies and existing laws.
It is easy to share your feedback with the Commission – answer a questionnaire or comment on our legal drafts. You can contribute in any of the 24 official EU languages. Sign-in using EU Login or a social media account.
Examples of consultations:
- European Education Area – interim evaluation
- Waste from electrical and electronic equipment – evaluating the EU rules
- Travel – digitalising travel documents to make travelling easier
- arstechnica.com Google risks forced breakup of ad business as EU alleges shocking misconduct
Google could lose huge parts of its $225 billion ad business.
Google may soon be ordered to break up its lucrative ad business, which amounted to nearly $225 billion in 2022 and represented nearly 80 percent of Google's total revenue.
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How the EU Plans to Regulate AI
www.dw.com How the EU plans to regulate AI – DW – 06/13/2023The European Parliament wants to divide content generated by artificial intelligence into different risk categories. While some systems could be banned, services like the popular ChatGPT would hardly be affected.
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Welcome to /c/europa
Welcome! This community is intended to be a space to discuss Europe and its institutions (the EU/EEA/etc), as well as anything to do with living, working, studying and travelling in the continent. We will use English in this community although Europeans from all nations are more than welcome.