Month: September 2022

On city buses, electronic displays flick between announcing their destination and declaring "love" for Ukraine with little hearts. This week Lithuania - together with Latvia, Estonia and Poland - banned all Russian tourists, arguing they should not be enjoying democracy and freedom in Europe while their government attacks those very values in Ukraine. The move has raised concerns among Russian opposition activists already abroad. "It's strange to ban people for being Russian, whether or not they support Putin's regime," argues Anastasia Shevchenko, an activist who spent two years under house arrest for protesting against the Russian president. When Russia invaded its neighbour, she was serving a suspended sentence and one wrong move, even an ...

"As a kid, I grew up looking at her in an aspirational way and thinking: 'Gosh, that's the Queen! And that's my dad receiving an [MBE] order from the Queen!'" the Aboriginal Australian television presenter says. "She's someone that I always looked up to." But as Ms Jacobs grew older, the meaning of the photo shifted. When she looks at it now, she sees a sovereign standing in front of a man who dedicated his life to having the sovereignty of his own people recognised. "And he died waiting for that recognition," the Whadjuk Noongar woman tells the BBC. Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have spoken of complicated emotions after the Queen's death. The oldest continuing cultures on Earth, they suffered great...

The UK has been seeking to access Horizon Europe, the EU's €95.5bn (£81.2bn) scientific funding programme, since it left the EU. The government said the EU "continues to decline this request" . A meeting on Thursday ended in deadlock. The European Commission has been approached for comment. Britain's continued participation was agreed in principle under the Trade and Co-operation Agreement, the post-Brexit trade deal. This participation has never been ratified. The government has accused the EU of breaching its treaty obligations over Horizon but Brussels says there was no "precise deadline" to finalize access. The delays are due to an ongoing dispute about post-Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland. IMAGE SOURCE,...

The words, meant to assure women of their safety, have become tragically ironic. Last week, inside the restroom, a young woman who worked at the station was brutally murdered. The man suspected of killing her had been stalking her for years. The wall underneath the plaque has since become a shrine of messages left as notes, with women and men of all ages coming to express their fury, fear, and sorrow. "I want to be alive at the end of my workday," reads one. "Is it too much to ask, to be safe to reject people I don't like?" reads another. The mother of a teenage girl cries as she scans the messages. "Where have we gone so wrong?" she asks, now questioning whether to allow her daughter to travel to school alone. Shocking murder The detail...

Those who cannot afford breakfast, pop into their local bar to eat and drink - thanks to the bar owner, plus the kind soul who earlier purchased the sospeso, or "suspended coffee". The sospeso initiative is said to have started more than 200 years ago in Naples and is now spreading across Italy, where an eye-wateringly strong coffee and accompanying croissant are viewed as a basic human right of a morning. Italians, like many others in Europe, are feeling the pinch. Spiralling energy bills compound already existing economic difficulties - hangovers from Covid lockdown measures and the euro crisis. "Italians feel abandoned. Especially here in the south," Pino de Stasio told me. His family have owned Bar Settebello in downtown Naples for decades. ...

LONDON -- The United Kingdom and the world bade farewell to Queen Elizabeth II on Monday with a state funeral that drew presidents and kings, princes and prime ministers — and crowds in the streets of London and at Windsor Castle — to honor a monarch whose 70-year reign defined an age. In a country known for pomp and pageantry, the first state funeral since Winston Churchill’s was filled with spectacle: Before the service, a bell tolled 96 times — once a minute for each year of Elizabeth's life. Then, 142 Royal Navy sailors used ropes to draw the gun carriage carrying her flag-draped coffin to Westminster Abbey, where pallbearers carried it inside and about 2,000 people ranging from world leaders to health care workers gathered to mourn. The trappings of state and monarchy abounded: The ...