NATO: France and Turkey fracture Nato on Libya - "as Erdogan plays a dangerous game he could lose"- by Andrew Rettman

"Who cares about the EU or NATO ? Trump  agrees with me"

Nato is to investigate French allegations that Turkish warships targeted a French one in a confrontation over the Libya conflict, which has divided allies.

"The incident in the Mediterranean [Sea] was addressed in the meeting by several allies", Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said after Nato defence ministers held video-talks on Thursday (18 June).

"We have made sure that Nato military authorities are investigating the incident to bring full clarity to what happened," he said.

Turkish warships locked their weapons systems on to a French frigate called the Courbet, which was part of a Nato monitoring mission called Sea Guardian, on 10 June, according to France.

And they did it in order to slip through yet another illegal shipment of arms to Turkey's ally in the Libya civil war, the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA), France said.

Note EU-Digest:  Curious - Whenever, or each time we put the President of Turkey's name ,Erdogan into the "Labels" column of our blog (EU-Digest), we were posting, the blog reported an error, and we had to go back and re-post the entire content of the blog, and rewrite the "labels"  removing Erdogan's name for it to work. Does this mean censorship by either some internal or external "source", or is it a real technical error? This is not the first time it happened when other sensitive issues were published.

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France and Turkey fracture Nato on Libya

EU: Poll shows majority EU citizens want refugees stopped before they cross Mediterranean - by RM

Europeans want refugees stopped at departure points

In a recent poll conducted by EU-Digest in April and May 88.89%  polled said refugees and migrants should be stopped before they make the dangerous Mediterranean crossing.

Only 11.11% said that those reaching EU shores should be processed as legal immigrants.

No one  polled felt that the EU had done an effective job so far in coping or dealing with this momentous problem

The new recently posted EU-Digest poll (May 27 thru June 27) focuses on the increased concerns surrounding the secretive Transatlantic Trade Negotiations ( TTIP) between the European Union and the USA.

Critics say this controversial trade deal presently being negotiated will remove safety standards on a large number of essential products, including agricultural products, pesticides, food and medicines, as well as dismantle financial regulations designed to prevent banks from creating another financial crisis, to mention just a few.

The agreement would also make it easier for multinationals to sue governments and could lead to significant slashes in EU regulatory laws related to environmental pollution controls and a variety of safety and health standards.


EU-Digest

Italy: Christian migrants thrown overboard into Mediterranean en route to Italy

Italian police arrested 15 Muslim migrants on Thursday suspected of throwing about a dozen Christians from a boat in the Mediterranean as it headed to Italy. Police in the Sicilian capital Palermo said they had arrested the men, from Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal after survivors reported they had thrown 12 people from Nigeria and Ghana to their deaths and threatened other Christians.

The 15 were arrested on charges of multiple homicide motivated by religious hatred.

“The motive for the resentment was traced to their faiths,” police said. “Twelve people are said to have drowned in the waters of the Mediterranean, all of them Nigerian and Ghanaian.”

The survivors’ account underscores the rising chaos in the Mediterranean, which thousands of migrants, many fleeing war and deprivation in Africa, try to cross in rickety boats in the hope of a better life in Europe.

In a separate incident the same day, another 41 migrants were feared drowned after their boat sank en route to Italy, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said.

Around 20,000 migrants have reached the Italian coast this year, according to the IOM, fewer than arrived in the first four months of last year, but the number of deaths has risen almost nine-fold.

Read more: Europe - Christian migrants thrown overboard into Mediterranean en route to Italy - France