Category: Europe
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Dozens of masked men in black blocked the approach roads to the Port of Dover on Saturday, halting ferry traffic and causing a four-mile queue. The government condemned it, the local MP called it disruption by outsiders, and the geography of the protest sits oddly with its stated cause.
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US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Saturday, then travelled to Kyiv to see Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday. European national security advisers joined part of the Kyiv talks. Nothing was announced, and former US ambassadors caution against reading activity as advance.
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Alternative für Deutschland took 43.8 per cent in Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt state election, more than double the CDU’s share. Winning the most votes and being able to form a government are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where German politics now sits.
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A Europe-based US Army unit has been told to stop specialising in drone warfare, a few hundred miles from the war that has redefined it. There is a defensible doctrine behind that — and a familiar way it goes wrong.
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This year’s Ig Nobels went to work on sweet-stealing and on what counts as a kiss. The prizes are routinely reported as a joke at the researchers’ expense. One past winner went on to take a Nobel in physics.
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Saxony-Anhalt is a vote away from a parliament where no government can be built on terms the rest of German politics accepts. The firewall is a commitment, not a law — and the arithmetic behind it is getting harder every election.
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Washington has asked European governments to repay American aid to Ukraine, in the same week its envoys went to Moscow without them. If alliance support is an advance to be recovered, every future guarantee carries an invoice.
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Thousands crossed into Ceuta last month, and Brussels says an organised campaign amplified the story from late July. Those are two separate claims, and each is routinely used to dismiss the other.
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Britain’s foreign secretary wants “more decisive action” on Gaza. The instruments a British government actually holds are countable, and each comes with an announcement attached. None has been made.
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Putin met Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Moscow for three hours and ten minutes. The Kremlin called it substantive, constructive and extremely frank. In the language of official read-outs, each of those words does a specific job.