标签： Europe

TIRANA, Albania — What began as a peaceful environmental movement has escalated into violent confrontation on the streets of Albania’s capital, as weeks of sustained protest against a luxury Adriatic coastal development tied to former U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner spilled over into clashes between demonstrators and police Thursday.

The ongoing daily demonstrations, branded the “Flamingo Revolution” by organizers, launched more than a month ago in opposition to the proposed high-end resort project planned for Albania’s Narta Lagoon, a critical habitat for protected migratory flamingos. What started as a movement centered on conservation concerns quickly expanded into a broader uprising against the government of Socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama, drawing thousands of participants to the streets in recent weeks.

On Thursday, several hundred demonstrators assembled outside Albania’s national parliament building in central Tirana, chanting calls for Rama’s resignation and carrying signs reading “Rama must go to jail.” The situation deteriorated rapidly when a segment of the crowd began pelting law enforcement officers with rocks, eggs, and plastic bottles. Protesters also used sections of broken metal barriers to smash the windows of a parked police vehicle. In response, police deployed tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannons to disperse the agitated crowd.

One protester, Agustela Thoma, framed the escalation as a reaction to months of unheard demands. “The protesters want their voice to be heard inside parliament, as the prime minister for so many days has not heard them and has ignored them. But enough is enough,” Thoma told reporters.

Albania’s Interior Minister Besfort Lamallari released a sharp condemnation of the unrest, labeling the clashes as “acts of vandalism and criminal violence” targeting police. “Police officers are public servants, citizens of the Republic, and family members just like everyone else. They serve the law, public order, and the safety of every citizen, without distinction. An attack against them is an attack against the state,” Lamallari said. Official government updates confirm 12 police officers suffered injuries during the confrontation, while 18 demonstrators have been taken into custody.

The proposed development, which spans an abandoned island and adjacent coastal stretch, has been framed as a transformative economic opportunity by Rama’s administration. For the post-communist Balkan nation, which has long sought accession to the European Union, the luxury resort is pitched as a key step to break into the lucrative high-end global tourism market. But the project has drawn fierce pushback from both environmental advocates, who warn it will destroy protected wetland habitats, and political opponents of Rama, who have criticized the government’s close ties to the Kushner-linked venture.

BERLIN — One year after taking office, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his cross-party center-right to center-left coalition government have unveiled an ambitious 34-measure reform package designed to pull Europe’s largest economy out of its extended period of stagnation, while attempting to reverse the administration’s plummeting public approval.

Germany’s economy has faced mounting headwinds in recent years: after two consecutive years of contraction, it recorded only modest growth in 2024, with the government projecting just 0.5% growth for the coming year. Multiple structural and geopolitical pressures have dragged on activity, including persistently high energy costs stemming from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, intensifying global competition from Chinese manufacturing firms, trade tariffs and threats from former U.S. President Donald Trump, and long-term demographic strain that has ballooned costs for the country’s public health and pension systems. More recently, fallout from the ongoing conflict in Iran has further downgraded growth projections.

Against this backdrop, the coalition’s new reform plan targets four core areas of policy change: income tax relief for working households, a comprehensive overhaul of the underpressure pension system, stricter sick leave regulations to boost productivity, and widespread cuts to Germany’s notoriously burdensome bureaucracy.

For low- and middle-income families, the tax reforms will deliver annual relief of 10 billion euros ($11.4 billion) once fully phased in by 2028. A typical household with two working parents, two children and a combined taxable income of 60,000 euros ($64,416) will receive an annual tax break of roughly 600 euros ($644) under the plan.

The pension system overhaul, the most consequential structural change on the agenda, will gradually adjust the retirement age — currently ranging between 65 and 67 years based on working history — to align with ongoing increases in national life expectancy. The framework follows recommendations released last month by a government-appointed expert and political panel, with two key goals: preventing a decline in overall pension benefits and avoiding drastic long-term hikes to the mandatory payroll contribution that employees pay into the national pension system.

To address what Merz has repeatedly called unacceptably high sick leave rates that erode national productivity, the coalition is tightening rules around medical certification. Under the new regulations, employers will be permitted to require a doctor’s note for any sick leave, regardless of duration. Previously, workers could take up to three sick days off without a medical certificate, and could obtain a one-week leave certificate via a telephoned request without an in-person doctor visit.

For bureaucracy reduction, the plan eliminates hundreds of unnecessary reporting and documentation requirements, cuts data protection rules to the minimum standard required by EU regulation, and streamlines the process for filing income tax returns to reduce administrative burdens for households and businesses.

In public remarks during the package’s launch at the Berlin chancellery garden, Merz framed the reforms as a decisive step toward securing Germany’s long-term prosperity. “These reforms all have one goal: We’re setting out into the future,” he said Thursday. “We’re strengthening ourselves so that we can live well in these new times.”

The chancellor also pushed back against widespread criticism that his coalition has been bogged down by internal infighting and delivered little tangible progress in its first year in office, leaving the administration deeply unpopular with voters. “From the very beginning, we set an agenda with a single goal in mind: We want to get Germany back on track. It is now clear that this is possible,” Merz said, appealing directly to German citizens to back the plan. “We know that you, ladies and gentlemen — the citizens of our country — want decisions, and you don’t want conflict. And that is exactly what we have delivered. Join us; support us in carrying out the reforms that are now necessary.”

Not everyone has welcomed the proposal. Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party — which secured second place in last year’s national elections — dismissed the package as inadequate. In a post on social platform X, Weidel called the measures “even more left-wing redistribution, and minimal compromises that don’t deserve to be called ‘reforms’.” She added, “The fact that this is being sold as a ‘breakthrough’ shows only one thing: this government’s complete inability to reform.”

LONDON — Eight decades after Britain’s state-sanctioned system of separating unmarried mothers from their newborn children began, and nearly 50 years after the practice ended, the UK government will issue a long-awaited formal apology to survivors this Thursday. The historic statement, scheduled for delivery in the House of Commons by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, comes in the final weeks of his current premiership and marks the first national acknowledgment of the British state’s direct role in widespread forced adoption schemes.

For much of the 20th century, rigid social mores, influential religious doctrine, and official government policy combined to stigmatize unwed pregnancy across the United Kingdom. Unmarried pregnant women were frequently hidden away in segregated institutions, pressured, deceived, or coerced into surrendering their infants for adoption by married couples, with the state endorsing and overseeing the practice until it was phased out in the 1970s. Official estimates place the number of babies separated from their unmarried mothers at 185,000 between 1949 and 1976 across England and Wales alone.

Survivor advocates have waged a decades-long campaign to secure official recognition that these women did not voluntarily give up their children, but were systematically stripped of parental choice. For many survivors, the apology represents a long-fought opportunity to overturn decades of stigma and blame. Ann Keen, a former UK health minister who was 17 when her child was taken for adoption in 1966, told the BBC she anticipates the apology will bring long-delayed release from the shame wrongfully imposed on her and other survivors. “We need this apology, because we have always been accused of giving up our babies, and we didn’t give them up,” Keen said. “We’ve now got the opportunity to really put this wrong right.”

Calls for a national state apology date back at least to 2022, when Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights explicitly recommended the UK government acknowledge the “pain and suffering caused by public institutions and state employees that railroaded mothers into unwanted adoptions.” The devolved governments of Scotland and Wales issued their own formal apologies in 2023, but the incumbent Conservative UK government at the time refused to issue a national apology. The move by Starmer’s Labour government also comes two weeks after the Church of England, which ran many of the maternity homes where unwed women were detained, issued its own formal apology for its role in the practice. Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally recently expressed profound regret for the “pain, trauma and stigma experienced — and still carried — by many people because of historical adoption practices in homes affiliated to the Church of England.”

The UK’s reckoning with this dark chapter of social policy places it alongside a growing number of high-income countries confronting similar historical injustices. Australia became one of the first nations to issue a national apology in 2013, when then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard delivered a landmark address acknowledging the “lifelong legacy of pain and suffering” caused by decades of state-mandated forced adoption. In Ireland, a years-long reckoning with Catholic Church-run mother-and-baby homes — where tens of thousands of unmarried women were confined in dehumanizing conditions — culminated in a 2021 public inquiry that found 9,000 children died in just 18 monitored institutions across the 20th century. Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin subsequently issued a formal apology for the “profound and generational wrong” inflicted on affected mothers and children.