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Selmayr ain’t welcome back in Brussels, EU officials say

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:37:42 GMT

BRUSSELS — The potential return of the “Monster of the Berlaymont” is freaking out Brussels.The halls of Brussels’ institutions are abuzz with gossip (and some fear) that Martin Selmayr, once the European Commission’s top civil servant, known for his abrasive leadership style, is set to return to the mothership as his assignment in Austria hits the term limit. If an official of his seniority were to return to Brussels, it would have to be to a big job. POLITICO spoke to a dozen EU officials in Brussels, all of whom said his return to Brussels was unwelcome, unlikely and, in the words of one Commission official, even “unthinkable” under the current boss of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who runs a tight ship. Still, the officials were granted anonymity to speak freely about Selmayr, who is still seen as a powerful figure, but has been packed off at a safe distance to head the European Commission’s office in Vienna. In a sign that even he ...

Football’s UEFA and FIFA lose EU court bid to halt breakaway Super League

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:37:42 GMT

Football’s governing bodies UEFA and FIFA broke EU competition rules by attempting to block the breakaway Super League, the European Union’s top court ruled.“The FIFA and UEFA rules on prior approval of interclub football competitions, such as the Super League, are contrary to EU law,” the Court of Justice said in a statement, adding that they breached EU competition law and the freedom to provide services.The two football organizations were “abusing a dominant position” when they cracked down on the competing league as their rules weren’t “transparent, objective, non-discriminatory and proportionate,” the court said.Judges are giving their advice on EU law to a Madrid court which will rule on the final details of the Super League legal challenge backed by Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.A dozen of Europe’s leading football clubs set up the Super League in April 2021 but the project collapsed after several clubs pulled out follo...

Harvard president’s corrections do not address her clearest instances of plagiarism, including as a student in the 1990s

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:37:42 GMT

(CNN) — Harvard President Claudine Gay recently requested corrections for two of her academic papers, but she did not address even clearer examples of plagiarism from earlier in her academic history at the school, according to a CNN analysis of her writings.In response to accusations of plagiarism, the embattled Harvard president recently submitted corrections to two papers she wrote as a professional academic in 2001 and 2017. But a CNN examination of Gay’s published works documented that Gay committed other, clearer examples of plagiarism while she was studying for her PhD at Harvard in the 1990s.Those include an instance in her dissertation where she copied lines verbatim from another source without citation.In addressing the allegations of plagiarism, neither Harvard nor Gay have corrected or acknowledged these earlier instances from when she was a student. The instances were first reported by t...

A train in Slovenia hits maintenance workers on the tracks. 2 were killed and 4 others were injured

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:37:42 GMT

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia (AP) — A passenger train on Wednesday struck a group of maintenance workers on the tracks, killing two of them and injuring four others, police said.The collision happened near the southwestern town of Postojna at around 9 a.m., the official STA news agency said.The report says the injured workers were seriously hurt. No other details were immediately available.The Associated Press

China has started erecting temporary housing units after an earthquake destroyed 14,000 homes

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:37:42 GMT

BEIJING (AP) — Hundreds of temporary one-room housing units were being set up Thursday in northwest China for survivors of an earthquake that destroyed more than 14,000 homes and killed at least 135 people, according to state media reports.Twelve people remained missing in an area hit by mudslides that inundated two villages, the reports said. Search teams were using excavators to dig out a thick sea of mud that covered roads and encased and blocked entry to buildings.State broadcaster CCTV showed footage of cranes lifting white, box-like housing units and lining them up in an open field in Meipo, a village in Gansu province. Some 260 had been erected, and the total in the village was expected to reach 500 across nine sites by Friday morning.The arrival of the prefab units was a sign that many of the more than 87,000 people resettled after the Monday night earthquake may be homeless for some time. Many have been enduring temperatures well below freezing in flimsier tent-like units w...

UN says up to 300,000 Sudanese fled their homes after a notorious group seized their safe haven

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:37:42 GMT

CAIRO (AP) — Fighting between Sudan’s military and a notorious paramilitary group forced up to 300,000 people to flee their homes in a province that had been a safe haven for families displaced by the devastating conflict in the northeastern African country, the U.N. said Thursday.The fighting erupted in the city of Wad Medani, the provincial capital of Jazeera province, after the Rapid Support Forces attacked the city earlier this month. The RSF said that it took over Wad Medani earlier this week, and the military said that its troops withdrew from the city, and an investigation was opened.Sudan’s war began in mid-April after months of tensions between military chief Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan and RSF commander Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo. Both generals led a military coup in October 2021 that derailed Sudan’s short-lived transition to democracy following a popular uprising that forced the removal of President Omar al-Bashir in April 2019.The U.N. agency International Organizat...

In the news today: Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. talks Trump, UN resolution on Gaza

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:37:42 GMT

Here is a roundup of stories from The Canadian Press designed to bring you up to speed on what you need to know today…‘Watershed year’ for Canada-U.S. ties: HillmanCanada’s ambassador to the United States says her team is hard at work getting ready in the event Donald Trump is elected president next year. But Kirsten Hillman is also celebrating what she says was a watershed year for Canada-U.S. relations in 2023. Hillman says President Joe Biden’s visit to Ottawa in March was a resounding success that helped to showcase what has become a deeper relationship between the two countries.At the same time, they’re in close contact with advisers to Trump, who appears poised to seize the Republican nomination and mount a campaign rematch against Biden. US engaging in high-level diplomacy to avoid vetoing a UN resolution on GazaThe United States, key allies and Arab nations are engaging in high-level diplomacy in hopes of avoiding another U.S. veto of a ne...

EU court: FIFA and UEFA defy EU competition law by blocking Super League

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:37:42 GMT

BRUSSELS (AP) — UEFA and FIFA defied European Union competition law by blocking plans for the breakaway Super League, the EU’s top court ruled on Thursday. The case was heard last year at the Court of Justice after Super League failed at launch in April 2021. UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin called the club leaders “snakes” and “liars” and threatened to ban players from Super League clubs.The company formed by 12 rebel clubs — now led by only Real Madrid and Barcelona after Juventus withdrew this year — started legal action to protect its position and the court was asked to rule on points of EU law by a Madrid tribunal.The clubs accused UEFA of breaching European law by allegedly abusing its market dominance of soccer competitions.“The FIFA and UEFA rules making any new interclub football project subject to their prior approval, such as the Super League, and prohibiting clubs and players from playing in those competitions, are unlawful,” the court said. “There is no framework for...

A ‘watershed year’ for Canada-U.S. relations, but guess who’s lurking in the wings?

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:37:42 GMT

WASHINGTON — Two years ago, the new United States ambassador to Canada arrived in snowbound Ottawa for the first time, thinking he knew all about America’s rock-ribbed relationship with its trusted northern neighbour. But David Cohen soon noticed something was amiss.“As I began to travel around Canada, I was surprised to learn the pervasiveness of the loss of trust, on Canada’s part, of the United States,” Cohen told business leaders last month in the national capital.“The constant refrain was, ‘What has happened to our relationship with the United States? Have we done something wrong?'”South of the border, Cohen’s boss in the Oval Office was acutely aware of the lingering foreign-policy scars his sharp-elbowed predecessor, Donald Trump, left among some historically close U.S. allies.That is how Kirsten Hillman came to encounter a surprise of her own. It was early 2023, and Hillman — Cohen’s counterpart in Washington — was at the...

Canada learned lessons from Trump’s first term — and vice versa, says ambassador

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:37:42 GMT

WASHINGTON — It’s a truism in foreign-policy circles that the world learned some hard lessons from Donald Trump’s volatile first term as president.But as the prospect of a second term looms, could it also be true that the notoriously stubborn Trump and his advisers left the White House with a better grasp of Canada’s relationship with — and importance to — the United States?“Yeah, I think so — I do,” said Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s envoy in Washington.For starters, there was the arduous 18-month renegotiation of NAFTA, in which even America’s self-proclaimed champion dealmaker has long suggested Canada proved a more worthy adversary than he expected.But Trump was also president in early 2020, when COVID-19 was beginning to flourish on North American soil, soon to blossom into a global crisis that showed the U.S. a thing or two about its largest trading partner.“When we restricted movement on our border, it took less than a day for peopl...