EU unveils defence spending fund

US urged to stay on world stage

BRUSSELS, June 7, (Agencies): The EU unveiled an unprecedented plan for common defence spending on Wednesday to help Europe stand alone as a global military power, while urging the United States under Donald Trump to remain on the world stage.

The proposal by Brussels for a 5.5-billion-euro a year fund follows a Franco-German led bid to focus on security and defence to provide a new sense of purpose after the Brexit vote last year shook Europe.

But the incentive has grown stronger since the election of Trump, who berated his European partners on military spending at a raucous NATO summit in Brussels last month even as he pursues his “America First” policy.

EU diplomatic chief Federica Mogherini said the bloc would continue to “encourage our American friends to stay engaged in the global scene -- I know it sounds surreal to hear this from Brussels to Washington but that is the reality of facts”.

But she said that there was a “growing need, desire to partner with the European Union, part of this might be linked to a certain unpredictability of positions on some issues our partners have seen in Washington.”

Her comments echo those by German Chancellor Angela Merkel who said last week that the US was no longer a reliable partner and that Europe had to take its destiny into its own hands.

The EU military plan would be a key part of this, Mogherini said, although insisting that it would not overlap the NATO military alliance.

“It’s not about substituting neither the alliance nor the United States, but it’s a matter of focusing on what we can do more for our own purposes, our own interests,” she said.

sional testimony, attorneys for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights allege that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002, while Haspel was in charge of a detention facility in Thailand known as Cat’s Eye base or Detention Site Green.

The submission identifies two CIA contractors, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, as the only people authorized to have contact with Zubaydah during that

Adding to the sense of chaos, is a more assertive Russia and a series of deadly attacks claimed by Islamic State group in France, Belgium and Britain.

The new EU fund will consist of two parts.

The first will help member states finance defence research into fields such as electronics, encrypted software, robotics and drones.

A draft unveiled at the end of 2016 envisaged a research programme with an annual budget of around 500 million euros after 2020.

The fund’s second portion will pool resources for big-ticket hardware purchases such as tanks, helicopters and drones.

This part would reach a budget of five billion euros a year once fully operational, with the commission arguing that member states waste 25 to 100 billion EU-wide when going alone.

Big questions remain on how the EU budget will pay for the new defence plans. The bloc will soon face an estimated 10-billion euro hole with the exit of net contributor Britain.

European nations also need to meet Trump’s demand that all NATO nations meet their commitment of spending 2 percent of GDP on defence.

But France and Germany, the EU’s powerhouses, have asked the commission to seize on Brexit as an opportunity for further defence cooperation given that Britain has always opposed closer EU defence ties.

London historically has feared that too much cooperation in Europe on military matters would diminish the centrality of US-dominated NATO to Europe’s security.

This opposition persists. EU member states last month agreed to set up a military command for training missions, but

time and claims they were answerable to Haspel.

The American Civil Liberties Union is currently suing Mitchell and Jessen on behalf of three men who say they were tortured using techniques the psychologists designed. A US Senate investigation in 2014 found their interrogation techniques produced no useful intelligence in the so-called war on terror, but some former intelligence officials say the techniques have produced valuable objections by Britain forced them to stop short of creating a full headquarters.

Brussels has repeatedly denied that it is creating an “EU army”.

The European Union’s executive is ready to increase support for the bloc’s first ever defence research programme, offering more funds to develop new military hardware in its earliest stages after years of government cuts, a top EU official said.

“European citizens see security as the number one thing that Europe should provide to them, so it’s time to propose this,” Bienkowska said in an interview.

With Britain, one of EU’s leading military powers, leaving the bloc, ideas for common EU defence are gathering pace in the wake of Islamic attacks in Western Europe. Europeans are also worried about U.S. commitment to NATO under President Donald Trump.

Also: BUCHAREST, Romania:

Bulgaria’s foreign minister says her country will finally complete reforms to its judicial system by the end of 2018 in order to end a decade of EU monitoring — “which can’t go on forever.”

During a visit to Romania Wednesday, Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva said Bulgaria is committed to fulfilling 17 recommendations to reach “an irreversible result” with reforms.

The EU is still monitoring the two countries’ progress on judicial reform and fighting corruption under the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism implemented when Romania and Bulgaria joined the bloc in 2007.

Bulgaria takes over the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU in January 2018. Neighboring Romania begins its six-month presidency in January 2019.

intelligence. (AFP)

Ferries suspended due to threat:

Ferry operator Scandlines said Wednesday it has evacuated all its ferries in the Danish town Rodby and suspended ferry traffic between Denmark and Germany due to security reasons following a telephone threat.

“All ferry operations have been suspended, and the ferries will be emptied as soon as the police allows them to go to port,” a Scandlines spokesperson said.

The local police said the suspension came after it had received a telephone call, but declined to elaborate. (RTRS)

12 held in Brussels probe:

Belgian police arrested 12 people in a series of raids across Brussels on Tuesday over suspected links to the March 2016 attacks on the capital, prosecutors said.

Police searched 14 properties across the city and took the suspects for “thorough questioning”, the federal prosecutor’s office said. The arrests were “within the framework of the inquiry” into the attacks on Zavantem Airport and the Maalbeek metro station in which 32 people were killed and more than 200 injured, the prosecutor’s office said in statement. “The investigative judge shall decide in the next few hours on their possible further detention,” it said.

The Brussels suicide bombings, which were claimed by the Islamic State group, were carried out by a jihadist cell that was also behind the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris. (AFP)