Tag: austria

The embattled prime minister had pinned her hopes on a last-ditch effort to persuade the European Union to work with her in devising a legal guarantee, known as a “joint interpretative instrument”, that she believes could get her Brexit deal through parliament. Following an address by May before a dinner, and subsequent discussions among the 27 member states, the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, suggested it was difficult to imagine any deal getting through parliament at the moment, and that it was not up to the EU to satisfy the demands of rebellious MPs. Juncker said: “Our UK friends need to say what they want, rather than asking what we want. Read more Deliberately avoiding the confrontational approach demanded by her hard Brexit critics, May had appealed to her EU counterparts to work with her in revising the Brexit deal. But Juncker said that he could not understand the mindset of British MPs, and indicated an unwillingness to bend to the Commons, setting up a nervous few weeks for Downing Street. The prime minister still hopes to begin a short, intense period of final negotiations with EU officials following the Brussels summit, leading to an additional guarantee that No 10 insists must have legal weight. The UK had hoped to set a year as a target for getting out of the backstop by negotiating a free trade deal or an alternative arrangement for avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland. That prompted hostile Conservative MPs to table a motion of no confidence in her as party leadership, which she saw off on Wednesday by 200 to 117. If it comes into force, the UK would remain in a customs union with the EU. And for the #eu also there will be no third country more important than the #uk.

EARLIER THIS month Poland celebrated the 100th anniversary of its re-establishment as a sovereign country. The borders that used to separate those empires have vanished from world maps, but still divide the landscape. On the ground, paved Prussian roads dissolve into gravel at old border crossings. Nowhere can the imperial boundaries be seen more starkly, however, than on Poland’s modern electoral map. Meanwhile, most of the east belonged to tsarist Russia, where serfdom remained legal until 1861. This gap remains today: Poland’s four eastern provinces are all among the EU’s poorest 20 sub-national regions. The Soviet Union claimed a chunk of eastern Poland as the spoils of victory, while Germany was forced to relinquish its own eastern borderlands to Poland. Modern Romania was also divvied up until 1918, when the northern regions belonging to the Austro-Hungarian empire were reunited with the south, which was ruled by the Ottoman empire until 1878. In the country’s presidential election of 2014, the north-west came out in favour of the liberal Klaus Iohannis, whereas the rest of Romania voted for Victor Ponta, the candidate of the successor party to the communist regime. In 2012 Romania’s two largest parties formed an electoral alliance, which evened out some of the regional disparities among their supporters.

Theresa May is launching a final pre-holiday push to get her Chequers plan back on track, as one of her former ministers said the EU’s attitude risked the UK facing a choice between a no-deal departure or “final capitulation” to Brussels. A day after Michel Barnier appeared to scupper a key element of the prime minister’s proposal by saying the UK could not collect EU tariffs under a future customs arrangement, May was in Austria for talks with its chancellor,Sebastian Kurz. With May’s Brexit plan rejected, the Tories are stuck | Martha Gill Read more His comments prompted Steve Baker, the former junior Brexit minister turned strong leave voice on the Tory backbenches, to say the EU seemed intent on pushing Britain into a deal involving membership of the European Economic Area (EEA) and customs union. “Chequers was bound to be the beginning of the EU pushing the UK to the unacceptable combination of EEA and customs union membership,” Baker said. “On this road, eventually we will reach a fork between final capitulation or exit with no agreement.” It was, he added, “far better to find the political and administrative will to solve the problems of the UK border with Ireland through an advanced FTA (free-trade agreement)”. At the talks, after which May will begin a holiday in Italy and Switzerland with a brief return to London in between, she will gauge whether individual EU member states could nudge Barnier and his team into taking a different view. But at the Friday press conference, Barnier warned against this: “Anyone who wants to find a sliver of difference between my mandate and what the heads of government say they want are wasting their time, quite frankly.” He was backed up by the Czech Europe minister, Aleš Chmela?, who said on Friday there was a fundamental problem with May’s customs plan, in which the UK and EU would collect any differing tariffs for each other. “There is a clear problem with the fact that the EU will not have a mechanism to control its borders and it would be delegated – without any EU control – to a third country, which would be Britain after March,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “So, that is the key principle. Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, told Business Insider that voters would see such a move as “a complete betrayal by the political class, and I think they would be right”.

A pair of gay male swans are off to an animal reserve after attacking several people at an Austrian lake. The swans were apparently protecting their nest which housed a colorful plastic cup as opposed to an egg. FOX News…