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Yahoo
22-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The hidden cost of your supermarket sea bass
At the entrance to the fish market in Joal-Fadiouth, a coastal town in central Senegal, a group of women have set up shop under the shade of a small pavilion. A few years ago, they say, the market would have been bustling with ice-cream sellers, salt vendors and horse-drawn carts delivering freshly caught fish to the women, who would set about sun-drying, salting and sorting the catch into affordable portions for local families to buy. Today, trade is dead, says Aissatou Wade, one of the remaining small-scale fish processors left in the town. 'Without fish [to sell], we have no money to send our children to school, buy food or get help if we fall ill,' she says. So what has happened? Wade and her fellow workers have become victims of the supply chain that feeds aquaculture – the world's fastest-growing food sector. A booming global trade in millions of small fish, caught to feed bigger farmed fish abroad, has drained Senegal's waters of a food source the country's population relies on. Until now, this opaque supply chain has obscured which companies use Senegal's fishmeal. However, a two-year investigation by the environmental investigations outlet DeSmog and the Guardian, spanning three countries, can reveal that UK consumers are playing a role in food insecurity and unemployment in west Africa. By examining trade data and shipping records and combining this with on-the-ground reporting in three countries, the investigation found that Turkish-farmed sea bass and sea bream is being fed on fishmeal exported from three factories in Senegal: Omega Fishing and Africa Feed south of Dakar, and Afric Azote at Dakar port. The women who work locally must keep their prices affordable for their customers and say they cannot compete on price with the factories, forcing increasing numbers of them out of work. The data led us from these factories, via Turkey's sea bass and sea bream farms, to Billingsgate fish market in London and the fish counters of supermarkets across the UK. Here, fish grown by farms that have used Senegalese fishmeal are labelled 'responsibly' sourced or farmed, based on certification from the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) and other standards bodies. We can reveal that at least five UK supermarkets – Waitrose, Co-op, Aldi, Lidl and Asda – have sold sea bass or sea bream grown by one of Turkey's largest fish farmers, Kılıç Deniz, or its subsidiary Agromey, which sources fishmeal made from small Senegalese fish. The supplier lists, in-store labels and interviews with industry sources link these supermarkets to Kılıç's farms. These retailers are supplied by two UK wholesalers – New England Seafood International and Ocean Fish, who use Kılıç and Agromey These two wholesalers have also sold sea bass or sea bream to Morrisons, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury's and Tesco, the investigation found. The investigation was unable to establish whether that fish came to the wholesalers via Kılıç or another supplier. Between them, these wholesalers have supplied supermarkets with 473 tonnes of fish raised by Kılıç, or its subsidiary Agromey, over the past four years, according to official data. That's enough fish to stack supermarket shelves with nearly 5 million fillets. The factories along Senegal's coastline used to rely on waste products, including fish heads and tails from the port and other factories, but now increasingly use more fresh pelagic or 'forage' fish, the mainstay of African small-scale fisheries. 'Farmed fish comes as this nice product, all the same size, good for the consumer, and no one knows it is jeopardising the prospects of people in west Africa,' says Béatrice Gorez from the Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements. More than 3,000 miles away from Senegal, Turkey is a fish-farming powerhouse, supplying more than half of the world's sea bass and a third of its sea bream. Kılıç is one of Turkey's leading sea bass and bream producers, earning $443m annually. A supplier of UK wholesalers and supermarkets, it is the biggest importer of Senegalese fishmeal among 11 Turkish rivals. It has shipped fishmeal and fish oil from Senegal every year for the last four years, a total of 5,400 tonnes, customs data shows. This would have been enough to meet the recommended dietary intake for nearly 2 million people. Sea bass and bream fed on Senegalese fishmeal may also have entered UK markets via three other Turkish fish farmers that also buy west African fishmeal, the investigation found – but it was not possible to trace their products' journey to sale points in the UK. Kılıç told the Guardian it was not breaking any laws by buying raw materials from Senegal, and that 'we do not manage the fishing policies' of other countries. Acknowledging 'concerns in world public opinion' Kılıç added: 'We think we can limit our purchases from Senegal.' Senegalese fish oil and fishmeal made up less than 1% of its total fishmeal purchases in 2024, Kılıç said, adding that the fish used were bigeye grunts and bumpers, which it claimed were 'not caught for human consumption'. Fishmongers and other sources in Senegal dispute this claim. Aby Diouf, a fishmonger, remembers selling dried fish as far inland as Mali and Burkina Faso. Now, she claims, much of that fish is sold to the factories, bypassing the women who wait on the shore to buy it. 'We were proud,' she says. 'We built our houses, we bought cars. We bought boats for our husbands – we even financed their fishing trips.' Diouf, who raised and educated her seven children from the trade, now rents out plastic chairs for baptisms and weddings. Nearly a quarter of the global catch of all wild-caught species – 17 million tonnes – was ground into meal or oil in 2022, the majority of it fed to farmed seafood. For a company farming millons of fish a year, even a small percentage of its purchases of fishmeal can have an outsized impact in Senegal. 'Changes that seem small at a global scale can have devastating consequences locally,' says Christina Hicks, an expert on small-scale fisheries and nutrition at Lancaster University. In 2023, a year in which its fishmeal exports reached an eight-year high, persistently high food costs pushed Senegal into crisis levels of hunger. Thousands of women have lost their jobs, according to Didier Gascuel, a fisheries ecologist at the Institut Agro Rennes-Angers in western France, who has lived and worked in Senegal. 'We are entering danger zones,' he says. 'It is clear that overexploitation combined with climate change and water degradation can lead to a collapse phenomena.' The Senegalese government offers financial sweeteners to companies that export more than 80% of their products or services, including a 50% discount on income tax and exemption from import duties. (The government did not respond to requests for comment.) Once the fishmeal arrives at Kılıç's feed mill, it is mixed with wheat, soy, fish oil and other ingredients to feed the millions of fish Kılıç harvests annually. Some of it travels frozen, overland or by boat in 18-tonne containers to ports in the UK such as Liverpool, Portsmouth, Dover and Hull. A quarter of all imports of Turkish bass and bream into the UK between 2021 and 2024 were from Kılıç, according to data from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), released in a freedom of information request. Fish farmed by Kılıç, or its subsidiary Agromey, has two routes to UK plates. The first is via hubs such as London's Billingsgate market, where men in white overalls gather at dawn among boxes brimming full of silvery sea bream and sea bass. The Guardian found some of them marked 'Kılıç'. 'We sell a lot, about 100 tonnes a week,' one trader for another UK wholesaler, Polydor, told the Guardian. 'It goes everywhere: fishmongers, Chinese restaurants, the public.' Defra data shows that Polydor has imported more than 7,000 tonnes of sea bream from Kılıç in the past four years, equivalent to more than 17 million whole fish, or 78 million fillets. The second route to UK tables is via wholesalers to supermarkets. In 2024, more than half a million fillets of sea bass farmed by Kılıç or its subsidiary arrived on supermarket shelves via New England Seafood International, which has offices in Grimsby and Chessington and Cornwall-based Ocean Fish, Defra data shows. In an opaque and fragmented supply chain, there is no way for consumers to tell if the sea bass or sea bream fillet they are buying was fed on fishmeal from Senegal. The Guardian and Desmog investigation has established that Kılıç-produced fish is on sale at Waitrose, which lists the Turkish company as one of its suppliers, and the Guardian understands that Co-op sells about six tonnes of sea bass farmed by Kılıç a year. Identification on packaging, supplier lists and conversations with employees of Kılıç, and its subsidiary Agromey, shows Lidl, Asda and Aldi have also sourced from Kılıç or Agromey. Sainsbury's and Tesco have sourced sea bass and sea bream from New England Seafood International, according to labelling on fillets on sale in supermarket branches and their latest supplier lists. When presented with the findings of the investigation, Lidl, Sainsbury's, Tesco and Waitrose declined to comment, referring the Guardian to a statement from Sophie De Salis, sustainability policy adviser at the British Retail Council: 'UK retailers are dedicated to sourcing seafood products responsibly. Our members regularly review fishing practices in their supply chains to ensure they meet the highest standards.' De Salis added: 'Retailers adhere to all legal requirements around product labelling. They ensure high standards are upheld throughout their supply chains through third-party certified verification.' Morrisons, Aldi and Marks & Spencer all said they did not currently source from Kılıç or Agromey farms but declined to say whether they had in the past. Aldi also said that, since last year, it no longer sources from the wholesalers mentioned in the investigation. Asda did not respond to requests for comment. Of the wholesalers involved in the chain, New England Seafood International said it was dedicated to 'sourcing responsible and sustainable seafood'. The other two, Polydor and Ocean Fish, did not respond to requests for comment. The Senegalese-owned factory Afric Azote, in Dakar, denied it contributed to overfishing or women's unemployment and said it only ever used whole, fresh fish when this was no longer fit for human consumption. The other factories in Senegal, Omega Fishing and Africa Feed, did not respond to requests for comment. Seafood fed on small west African fish can be labelled 'responsibly' sourced or farmed as long as it meets standards determined by the ASC. Under ASC rules, a farm can only buy fishmeal from sources where fisheries are 'reasonably well managed' with healthy stocks. Kılıç, which produces a quarter of its sea bass and sea bream from four farms certified by the ASC, said it was not in breach of ASC standards. The ASC said that The ASC said Senegal was not listed as a sourcing country in 2024 for whole fish marine ingredients by Kılıç. But in any case sourcing of this fish may not breach its rules, it said, if these fish were mixed into feed. These fish could be mixed into feed as long as the balance of ingredients met its standards. Diaba Diop, head of a national network of women fish workers in Senegal, says foreign companies should source their ingredients elsewhere. 'The sea will become a liquid desert,' she says. 'When people don't have enough to eat, we can't use it to feed animals.' Abdou Karim Sall, head of the fishers's network in Joal-Fadiouth, has seen the town emptying like the sea, as young men who see no future in the country risk the 1,500km boat trip to the Canary Islands, a perilous journey that claimed more than 10,000 lives last year. 'Because there's no fish, there's no hope,' says Karim Sall. 'The fish should have stayed in Senegal.' Additional reporting by Oscar Rothstein (Danwatch), Mustapha Manneh and Michaela Hermann
The Guardian
30-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Inside Taganrog: beatings, electrocution and starvation at prison where Ukrainians were tortured
Some weeks after being detained as she attempted to leave a Russian-occupied part of Ukraine in January 2023, Yelyzaveta Shylyk was given a polygraph test. As her interrogators attached the lie detector's wires to her, they calmly issued a threat about what would happen if she failed the test: 'You'll go to a place where you'll regret being born.' That place, she would later find out, had a name: Sizo number 2, a pre-trial detention centre in the southern Russian city of Taganrog. Prior to the full-scale invasion in February 2022, the facility held juvenile inmates and mothers with young children. After the outbreak of hostilities, it was repurposed as a torture centre for Ukrainian captives, and it has since emerged as the darkest link in a network of detention centres across Russia and occupied Ukraine. Guards subjected not only combatants but also civilians to sustained violence and torture. The exact number of civilian detainees is impossible to ascertain, but the Ukrainian parliament's commissioner for human rights, Dmytro Lubinets, said that as of April 2024 the number registered as having disappeared stood at 16,000. The majority are in legal limbo and have not been charged with any crime. Their locations are often undisclosed, although information sometimes filters out via released prisoners of war. Ukraine believes they are being held at as many as 180 separate sites. The Guardian and its reporting partners have identified the systematic use of torture at 29 of these sites – 18 in Russia and 11 in Russian-occupied territories. The most common methods used include electric shocks, waterboarding, mock executions, blows with wooden and metal hammers, and repeated beatings on the same body part, alongside bizarre humiliations such as a person being tied up with tape and then sat on as 'human furniture'. Detainees have also reported a ban on speaking Ukrainian, severe food rationing, and being goaded to take their own lives. The worst of these sites have seen multiple fatalities. The use of torture to extract information or false confessions appears to have been organised and sanctioned by Moscow at the highest levels. These are the findings of the Viktoriia project, an investigation over six months involving 13 media outlets, including the Guardian, the Washington Post and Le Monde, led by the French group Forbidden Stories. Named for the Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, who died in custody after spending months in Taganrog, it draws on more than 50 interviews with some of those who survived Russian captivity and with the families of some of those still held. Legal sources operating inside Russia and the occupied territories have also shared information, as have prison officials who resigned from the service in distress over what they had witnessed. Taken together, a picture emerges of a brutal and systemic assault on Ukrainian prisoners. 'It is clear to me that torture is part of the Russian war policy and apparatus, both of Ukrainian civilians as well as of captured prisoners of war,' the UN's special rapporteur on torture, Alice Edwards, said in an interview. 'It's being applied across all regions occupied by the Russian Federation, in all types of detention facilities. That level of organisation can only be approved at the highest levels.' The birthplace of Russia's cherished playwright Anton Chekhov, Taganrog is a quiet city on the Azov Sea. It is the closest Russian city to Mariupol, which was occupied by Moscow's forces in May 2022 after fierce fighting. In the months after Mariupol fell, Russia transferred some of its most high-value prisoners to Taganrog, including soldiers from the Azov brigade who had defended the city. They featured heavily in Russian propaganda about the war as 'neo-Nazis', and Moscow had promised to hold show trials for them. Satellite imagery shows that as the prison filled up with Ukrainians, during the summer of 2022 it was reinforced with new steel roofs. The violence at Taganrog began on arrival. The first Ukrainian prisoners were sent there in April 2022, often tied up and blindfolded onboard military trucks daubed with the Z symbol. Most were subjected to a 'welcoming' procedure known as 'reception', where guards would punch, kick and beat them with batons. 'This is a sacred ritual for them. Blindfolded, with your hands tied and your head bowed low, you are ordered to walk, and every dog standing there considers it necessary to hit you with something,' said Volodymyr Labuzov, the chief medic of a Ukrainian marine brigade, who arrived in Taganrog in April 2022. Over time, civilians were also taken to Taganrog, symbolic of a system that has blurred the lines between combatants and supposed 'hostile elements' among the civilian population in occupied territories. Before 2022, the facility had held about 400 Russian detainees, but reports of overcrowded cells as well as analysis of its food procurement contracts suggest it may have held many more Ukrainian prisoners at the peak of its operations. A typical meal at Taganrog was about four and a half spoonfuls of food, according to former detainees. One counted a serving of pasta containing 15 small pieces. Sometimes they were given fish, but it was mixed with bones and entrails. Some would not eat during the day, saving their rations for a single evening meal just to feel full enough to sleep normally. Labuzov said men typically lost up to 25kg (4st) during detention. Using detailed testimonies from six former detainees, plus photographs and public information such as construction contracts, the collaboration produced a 3D model of the prison and reconstructed the torture rooms, interrogation room and cells. To help map the layout, former detainees, who were often blindfolded during interrogations, used techniques such as remembering the number of steps taken to go between rooms. After the 'reception', the violence continued, with regular beatings during the twice-daily cell searches and, most viciously, during interrogations. Two buildings were identified as the main torture sites inside Taganrog. Former inmates recalled hearing the screams coming from these areas. Serhiy Taranyuk, a former Ukrainian marine detained in Taganrog, said he was often interrogated in a room sparsely furnished with a chair and a table. 'You go in, you are immediately thrown on the floor, you start to get beat and cut … Then, when you are ready to tell them something, they tell you to sit down,' he said. Taranyuk said he was forced into making a false confession. All Ukrainian prisoners who passed through Taganrog reported horrifying and sustained torture, including civilians and female prisoners. Shylyk, a former soldier who was a civilian at the time of her detention, was beaten with batons all over her body, subjected to electric shocks, threatened with rape and attacked with dogs. Oleksandr Maksymchuk, a prisoner of war who spent 21 months in Taganrog across two separate stints, wrote in testimony obtained by the Guardian of repeated beatings, electric shocks, suffocation and a technique where guards wrapped prisoners from head to toe in sticky tape and then 'used them as human furniture'. Shylyk mentioned a room containing an electric chair: 'I was put in the electric chair twice … with a device that attached clamps between my toes. Then they turned on the current.' She described overhearing guards complaining about having to keep the electrocution time to under two hours to avoid killing inmates, as deaths meant more paperwork. Another dedicated torture room was used to hang handcuffed detainees upside down in a foetal position, their knees strapped to a bar, for 10-15 minutes while being severely beaten. In some locations, shocks were administered using a Soviet-era battery-powered field phone called a TA-57. The technique, nicknamed 'Putin's phone' by prisoners, involved attaching wires to earlobes, the nose or genitals. Labuzov was repeatedly assaulted by guards demanding he confess to mutilating Russian soldiers. 'During one of the interrogations, the investigator asked me to state my rank and position. But he didn't even listen to who I was … I was immediately hit on the head with a wooden hammer. 'This investigator said: 'Tell me something interesting so we can stop beating you.'' Labuzov said he was then shocked with electrical wires and hit with a baton and a chair leg. On another occasion, Labuzov recalled, his palms were burned with a lighter. Once, he was taken to the boiler room and pushed waist-deep into a stove used to heat water, then placed on the meat-cutting table in the kitchen, where he was threatened with a knife. Others recounted psychological pressure that included forced indoctrination, forced reciting of patriotic Russian poems, and repeated physical and sexual threats. The cells were overcrowded, with eight men squeezed into a space built to house half that number. Labuzov also recalled another presence constantly watching over the prisoners. 'In all four cells where I was, there was a portrait of Putin,' he said. Since November 2022, public information suggests the Taganrog facility has been headed by Aleksandr Shtoda, who took over from the previous head, Gennady Bodnar. Shtoda, the son of two postal workers, was born in a village not far from Taganrog, and before his current role he had held a management position at the prison in 2019 and 2020. One prisoner recalled Shtoda frequently advising detainees to take Russian citizenship. He was often polite, and even joked with some of the inmates. There is no evidence that he personally oversaw any interrogations or torture. But as head of the facility, he was ultimately responsible for the conditions in which prisoners were held. Reached by Telegram voice call, Shtoda, 44, hung up. He then read follow-up questions sent by text but did not answer them or a later formal request for comment. The consortium also made efforts to contact Bodnar and a further 35 current and former employees of the Taganrog facility identified through prisoner testimony and open-source research. Most either did not answer calls, immediately hung up or denied working there. Two claimed conditions at the jail were 'excellent' while one denied Ukrainians were held there at all. While prison staff oversee the day-to-day running of the facility, officers from Russia's FSB security service are in charge of the torture system and conduct the most important interrogations. They control the cases of known dissidents and push for confessions. To back up the FSB, Russia has deployed special units of the FSIN prison service to work on Ukrainians, and they reportedly carry out much of the actual violence. Testimony obtained from three sources formerly inside the system, shared exclusively by the human rights group all pointed to a decision taken in the early weeks of the war to encourage physical violence. One former senior FSIN official recalled meetings in the spring of 2022 in which the head of the St Petersburg FSIN branch, Igor Potapenko, appears to have told commanders they would in effect have carte blanche to use violence. It seems unlikely Potapenko was acting on his own initiative, and international observers believe ultimate responsibility for these policies, which were applied across the prison service, lies with the Kremlin. 'It wasn't phrased explicitly as 'go beat them' but it was understood. It was communicated down the chain, from the general and his deputy to the commander of the special forces unit and then to the soldiers, that we were to 'work hard, do everything possible'. That was the euphemism. But everyone understood what it meant. The message was: 'Do what you want,'' claimed the source. In contrast to previous assignments inside Russian prisons, when officers wore body cameras to provide a semblance of accountability, now there would be none. 'There would be no video recording of any violent actions. That was stated clearly. No documentation, no oversight,' the source recalled. FSIN and Potapenko, who was recently appointed deputy governor of St Petersburg, did not respond to requests for comment. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also declined to comment. By analysing reports from the UN and Ukrainian intelligence, the collaboration located 29 Russian-run detention centres where torture had been reported. The facilities can hold an estimated 18,000 people in total, according to public directories. A total of 695 separate forms of torture were recorded. The information suggests Ukrainian detainees have been scattered across Russia, held as far as 600 miles from the border with Ukraine. The sources said FSIN special forces units were sent on month-long rotations around different Russian regions, ensuring they never formed a connection with prisoners. Valeriia Subotina, a press officer for the Azov brigade who spent months in Taganrog, confirmed that the guards would rotate roughly every month. According to a Ukrainian intelligence source, FSIN special forces units from Chechnya, Dagestan, North Ossetia and Rostov, with the group names Grozny, Orel, Bulat and Rosna, were deployed at various times to Taganrog. The guards took care to give little away about their identities. Blindfolds were frequently used for prisoners, and detainees were forbidden to look out of windows. Guards addressed each other using call signs instead of names. One called himself 'wolf', another 'shaman', a third used the codename 'death'. All wore balaclavas or other face coverings, suggesting a systemic concealment of identities in order to avoid future accountability. One former senior FSIN official claimed the original rationale for using torture was to extract information that might be useful to Russia's military forces or civil administrations in occupied areas. 'Information about targets, training sites, preparations, the names of commanders, people who might have had useful connections, even civilians who could be of interest.' Reports suggest the abuse was also used as a tool for humiliating Ukrainians, often with a marked ethnic element of denigration. Oleg Orlov, the Nobel peace prize-winning Russian rights activist, said the basic system of kidnapping and disappearance of 'disloyal' civilians was familiar from Russia's Chechen wars. 'But there is also something new. This continuous, regular cruelty and torture over months and years, this long-term torture for whole groups, I never heard of this in the Russian prison system before,' he claimed. Subotina said a few of the guards she encountered appeared torn: 'They said quietly that they have no choice … that they had no options but to follow orders.' Most, however, seem to have carried out their work with enthusiasm. The majority of civilians are held, for months or years, without any charge. Families may eventually receive a terse confirmation that their relatives are being detained 'for opposing the special military operation', using the Kremlin's term for the war. These prisoners are known as 'incommunicado'. They do not have the right to send letters or receive parcels and Russia often will not even confirm at which prison they are being held. Often, the first that relatives will hear about where their loved ones are is when those released in an exchange give testimony about the people they shared a cell with. Legal experts say the framework by which Russia is holding the civilians it seized on occupied territories is unclear and not based in law. 'There is no official crime in the Russian legal code of 'opposing the special military operation'. All of this exists outside the legal field. It's an absurd situation; even in Stalin's time there were always charges,' said Vladimir Zhbankov, of an NGO that helps people look for their loved ones. One Russian lawyer who works on Ukrainian cases said: 'There are people who have been imprisoned for years and we don't even know where they are. There is no access to them. We periodically send requests to ask where they could be. But in response … they say according to their data there has never been such a person, never detained.' Access to prisoners in Taganrog is said to be even harder than in most facilities. 'It's impossible for a lawyer to get into Taganrog. I show up and they give me a written refusal: 'I am declining the services of a lawyer.' It doesn't name any lawyer, just says 'lawyer' in general, and is signed and dated,' said one lawyer who tried to take on a case of someone held at Taganrog. The few who still do this work have to carry a huge burden. 'Lawyers have to be social workers and psychologists too. It's very high-risk, it's emotionally extraordinarily difficult. We are the only people who have access,' said one legal source. 'A lawyer I know saw their client who had been in Taganrog, and the prisoner was in such a bad condition that the lawyer cried for three days,' the source added. According to a Ukrainian intelligence source, as of autumn 2024 there had been at least 15 cases of Ukrainians dying at Taganrog, based on witness statements from detainees who returned in prisoner exchanges. One died from torture during interrogation, four collapsed and died during the violent 'reception' upon arrival, and in a further 10 cases specific data was not available. 'There was never a doctor in the colony, only a paramedic,' Labuzov said. 'When prisoners were unwell, she would come and just ask what was wrong. And she didn't even give them pills.' If the condition was serious, an ambulance was called from the local hospital, but it often came late, sometimes not until the next day. 'I know for sure that one man died like that,' Labuzov said. In recent months there have been reports of improved conditions in Taganrog, and there are suggestions it has been returned to its prewar purpose. While the torture rooms may have fallen silent, they can still be used to instil fear. 'Taganrog works as a threat now,' said the Russian legal source. 'If they say 'we're going to send you to Taganrog', many people will sign whatever you tell them to.'
Forbes
28-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Youth Visas: U.K. Once Again Reported To Be Considering Scheme With EU
A person working in a cafe getty The United Kingdom is reported to be considering a deal with the European Union to open up visa pathways for young people to live and work for a year or two on each side of the English Channel. Such youth visas and mobility schemes have been suggested - and swiftly shot down - by successive U.K. governments amid a post-Brexit hostility towards Europe. Now, at the urging of various European governments, it seems the idea is back on the table. According to the U.K. newspaper the Guardian, which first broke the story, progress has been made on reciprocal youth mobility schemes (also known as working holiday visas) between the U.K. and EU. Such schemes typically involve time-limited work visas for people aged between 18 and 30 years, usually one or two years. The United Kingdom already has such schemes with a number of non-EU countries - most notably Australia. Likewise, many European countries have reciprocal deals in place for youth mobility schemes (with Australia once again featuring prominently). In theory, the schemes benefit young people who get to expand their horizons, develop their professional experience or simply use temporary work to finance extended holidays. Employers in host countries benefit from a steady stream of cheap labor to work their bars, coffee machines and ski resorts. As the United Kingdom has been part of the European free movement regime before its exit from the EU, there had previously been no need for such a deal with European countries. The politics of the U.K. after Brexit were quite starkly anti-European, with any hint of active cooperation with the bloc slammed in the right-wing press and shirked away from by more progressive elements not wanting to look like they were 'betraying' Brexit voters. It was this exact political tone that saw Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer swiftly stamp out rumors of a potential youth mobility scheme with Spain in 2024, after the right-leaning Telegraph newspaper accused him of pursuing a 'free movement' deal (to be clear, youth mobility visas, with their time-limited nature and age restrictions, are not 'free' in any sense.) Nonetheless, with the constant urging of Starmer's allies around Europe, and apparently some semantic massaging to emphasize the 'youth' aspect of the scheme, rather than the 'visa' part, it seems a youth mobility scheme with various EU member states may be in the works. This, while being welcomed by Europe, may come as some relief to British industry, who have long been struggling with historic labor shortages across large swathes of the economy. More broadly, the news that such a youth mobility scheme might be in the works suggests that perhaps cooperation with the EU - even on the once-verboten matter of immigration - might be slowly turning less toxic. One surprising thing in the Guardian article was the endorsement of the scheme by Steve Baker, known to be one of the most vocal and militantly anti-EU of the 'Brexiteers.' Whether or not this particular youth visa scheme materializes, the mere fact of it being openly considered by both sides of the Brexit divide suggests that more cooperation with the EU is becoming more possible.
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Guardian: Trust gap between Ukraine and Russia is major obstacle to peace, advisor to Turkish president says
Akif Çağatay Kılıç, a foreign affairs adviser to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has revealed what he believes is the key obstacle to peace in Ukraine. Source: the Guardian, citing Kılıç, as reported by European Pravda Details: Kılıç noted that one of the main obstacles to a peaceful settlement between Ukraine and Russia is the "loss of trust" between the two sides. "The main problem is a loss of trust. Nobody trusts anyone," Kılıç said. Türkiye has played a pivotal role as a mediator in the Ukraine-Russia talks, maintaining positive relations with both sides, despite its military support for Ukraine. It hosted the 2022 talks between Ukraine and Russia and has expressed a willingness to do so again if asked. Background: Erdoğan has recently called on Russia to "respond constructively" to the US proposal for a truce in Ukraine. Following the talks in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia on 11 March, Ukraine said it is willing to implement a 30-day ceasefire, provided that Russia also adheres to it. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Washington will submit a proposal for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine to Russia and said he hopes Russia will accept it. Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!
The Guardian
06-03-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Moon missions, Musk v scientists, sperm and longevity
Striking images show Blue Ghost Mission 1's successful moon landing Elon Musk survives as fellow of Royal Society despite anger among scientists Men with higher-quality sperm live longer, study finds Support the Guardian:
