00:00European Union High Representative Kaya Kalas insists on unity to avoid falling
00:05into Russia's special envoy trap regarding the war in Ukraine.
00:10The European Commission hit Chinese online retailer Temu with a 200 million euros fine on Thursday.
00:21For the European Union to engage in direct talks with Russia, the mandate matters more than the
00:28person, foreign ministers said as they gathered in Cyprus for an informal meeting on Thursday.
00:34This unity, they warned, would only play into Moscow's hands and undermine Ukraine.
00:40I find that it's a trap that Russia wants us to walk into, that we discuss who talks to them
00:46and
00:46they are already picking who is suitable or who is not. Let's not walk into that trap. Negotiations
00:52is always a team effort. You have good cups, you have bad cups, you have a strategy how you go
00:57to
00:58the table. So that's why the substance is much more important than who.
01:04Kaya Kalas implicitly referred to the Kremlin's far-fetched suggestion of former German Chancellor
01:09Gerhard Schröder as the bloc's chief negotiator. Schröder is a pariah in mainstream European politics,
01:16thanks in large part to his continued warm relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin
01:21and lobbying for several Russian energy companies. Kaya Kalas, who has circulated a confidential paper
01:28with concessions and expectations that Russia should fulfill as part of a settlement, suggested the EU
01:34approach the negotiations from a maximalist stance to counter Putin's own maximalist demands.
01:45Russian President Vladimir Putin does not want to negotiate with Europe. Ukraine's former prime
01:51minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, told Euronews. Putin is not eager, he is not ready for any kind of talks at
01:57this particular juncture. Maybe he would accept some kind of negotiator with the only very simple and
02:04obvious reason to buy time and once again to outweigh it and to cheat us. Meanwhile Europeans haven't
02:12decided yet who could beat the EU negotiator. I'm not sure that Putin is ready to accept anyone. What
02:19Putin is ready to accept, he is ready to accept Ukraine's and actually European surrender. And we
02:24have to realize this. It is not about the names. It's not about some kind of international or domestic
02:30politics. It is about policy. What kind of policy we're going to pursue towards Russia. The only
02:36language Putin understands is the language of force and strength. High Representative Kaya Kalas stressed
02:42Europeans should agree first on their co-requests to Russia before considering talking to Moscow.
02:48The matter is said to be on the agenda of an informal meeting of European foreign affairs ministers on
02:53Thursday. Israel's military says it carried out an airstrike on a southern suburb of the Lebanese
03:02capital Beirut on Thursday. A ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah was supposed to have taken
03:07effect on the 17th of April but has never been fully observed. Still Beirut has been mostly spared
03:13with Israeli attacks largely focused on Lebanon's south. Thursday's strike came as tensions continue to
03:20escalate in the south where Israeli troops are advancing deeper into Lebanese territory and
03:25issuing evacuation orders for areas beyond the so-called yellow line, an Israeli-declared border
03:30area under its control. So far over one million people have been displaced by the war between Israel
03:37and Hezbollah.
03:53Strikes on Lebanon's south also intensified on Thursday after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced
04:00an expansion in the Israeli military's operation there. Among the hardest hit were the cities of
04:06Sudan, Tyre and Nabatyeh where several people were killed including children. Hezbollah also claimed
04:13dozens of drone and rocket attacks that it says targeted Israeli troops in southern Lebanon and northern Israel.
04:24A man stabbed three people at a train station in Switzerland on Thursday before being arrested,
04:30the police said.
04:48The police later specified the suspect is a Swiss-Turkish national from the local area who was
04:54already known to authorities. According to the Swiss public broadcaster SRF he had links to the
05:00radical Islamist scene.
05:09The three victims are 28, 43 and 52 years old. They are all Swiss. One is already out of the
05:15hospital,
05:16the other one is almost out of the hospital and the third one is still hospitalised with a wound
05:29Italian authorities have seized more than 200 million euros in assets linked to the late mafia boss
05:38Matteo Messina Denaro's drug trafficking network. The seizure included more than 12
05:44kilos in gold, millions in cash, premium watches and some 20 luxury properties, investigators said.
05:51Prosecutors described Thursday as a blow to the Sicilian mafia's attempt to rebuild its financial power.
05:58Significa continuare in un processo di disarticolazione necessario per impedire la formazione di strutture
06:36messina denaro in a prison hospital some nine months after he was arrested in January 2023, ending three decades as
06:45a fugitive.
06:46More than 150 Italian financial police officers carried out searches in Italy and abroad,
06:54including in Andorra, Gibraltar, the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, Lebanon, Monaco and Spain.
07:04In the next five years, Earth is overwhelmingly likely to surge again and again past the international
07:10climate threshold set as safe and shatter its hottest year record along the way,
07:16according to new United Nations climate projections.
07:19The World Meteorological Organization, WMO and the UK's Meteorological Office,
07:25say there's a 70% chance that the average global temperature between 2026 and 2030 will exceed 1.5 degrees
07:34Celsius since pre-industrial times.
07:36There's a 91% chance that at least one of the next five years will shoot past the 1.5
07:43degrees Celsius threshold and
07:45an 86% chance that one of those years will smash the record for Earth's hottest year set in 2024,
07:52the WMO report warns.
07:55Nearly all the shorter-term forecasts call for a strong El Nino, a natural warming of parts of the Central
08:02Pacific that alters weather worldwide and spikes global temperatures to form soon.
08:07The WMO report says it could stretch all the way to 2028.
08:18The European Commission hit Chinese online retailer Temu with a €200 million fine on Thursday.
08:24The EU investigation found the e-commerce giant didn't do enough to protect consumers from illegal products.
08:32Temu reaches 130 million consumers in the European Union, but the company has not properly assessed the risks of illegal
08:42products being sold on its marketplace.
08:44What products are we talking about? Dangerous toys for kids, small electronics without proper label, clothes and jewellery containing harmful
08:53chemicals, to name just a few.
08:56Preliminary findings last year revealed Temu was exposing consumers to dangerous products such as harmful baby toys and faulty chargers.
09:05The bloc issued the penalty under the Digital Services Act, or DSA, a rulebook that requires online platforms to protect
09:13Internet users from harmful content or dodgy goods.
09:17Temu did not respond immediately to a request for comments.
09:26Four Italian cities are expected to be on red alert warnings, with temperatures exceeding 30 degrees on Thursday.
09:34Even Pope Leo XIV came to the aid of a man who fainted while curing to shake hands with the
09:40pontiff in St. Peter's Square on Wednesday.
09:43The cities affected include Rome, Florence, Bologna and Turin, according to local media citing the Italian Health Ministry.
09:51Meanwhile, tourists in Rome are feeling the heat.
09:54In the daytime, we went up to the Colosseum and it was very, very hot.
10:01So, yeah, if you're dressed for the weather, have your parasol, have your sunglasses, have Factor 50.
10:08As long as you stick to the shadows, it's doable.
10:11But I don't want to go into the basilisk now.
10:16It's way too hot to go into the waiting room.
10:27According to Italy's Health Ministry, a red warning alert means the heat poses a risk to the health of the
10:34general population, not just vulnerable groups.
10:37People have been advised to limit their movements.
10:45Researchers on a Greenpeace expedition are exploring the Arctic deep sea, one of the least known wildernesses on Earth.
10:52More specifically, they are exploring the so-called banana hole to search for undiscovered species and ancient ecosystems.
10:59The banana hole is a remote and mysterious area of the Arctic high seas that lies in international waters, located
11:06between Norway and Greenland.
11:09Greenpeace says it is home to seamounts or underwater mountains, as well as volcanic hot springs, which it says acts
11:15as a living library of our planet's history.
11:20However, despite of its importance, the environmental organization says the banana hole is under threat of deep-sea mining.
11:27The Greenpeace vessel departed earlier this month for a month-long expedition to raise awareness on the danger of deep
11:34-sea mining.
11:34They are now live-streaming from depths down to 3,000 meters until the 30th of May, and the expedition
11:41is expected to last until early June.
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