Italy's Meloni will host Macron in Rome on June 3, her office says

ROME, May 28 (Reuters) - Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will host French President Emmanuel Macron for talks in Rome on June 3, Meloni's office said on Wednesday.
"The main topics of the bilateral, European and international agenda will be at the centre of the talks," Meloni's office said in a statement, without elaborating further.

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BBC News

29 minutes ago

• BBC News

Russia's economy is down but not out

Since its illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has become the most sanctioned nation on Earth, and yet its economy has been remarkably 2024, if Russian official figures are to believed, its economy outgrew those of all the G7 nations - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the Russian economy expanded by 4.3% last year, compared with 1.1% in the UK, and 2.8% in the growth in Russia was led by the Kremlin's record military country's oil exports, by volume, have also remained relatively stable, as supplies once destined for Europe have been diverted to China and a "shadow fleet" of tankers, whose ownership and movements could be obscured, has helped Moscow circumvent sanctions the Russian rouble has recovered to become the best-performing world currency this year, with gains of more than 40%, according to Bank of as we move towards 2026, the mood music is changing. Inside the country inflation has been persistently high, interest rates have soared to 20%, and companies can't find the workers they need. And globally, oil prices had fallen back this year before the current conflict between Israel and Iran caused a economy minister warned on Thursday that the country was "on the verge" of recession after a period of "overheating".And some Russia watchers have even suggested the economy could be headed for how likely is that really? And how does it affect the course of the war?Yevgeny Nadorshin, an economist based in Moscow, tells BBC News: "Overall, it will be a pretty uncomfortable situation until late 2026, and definitely there will be defaults and bankruptcies."But he predicts the downturn will be "mild" and calls any suggestion of a meltdown a "total lie"."Without any single doubt, the Russian economy has experienced a number of recessions deeper than this."Mr Nadorshin points out that Russia's unemployment rate is currently at a record low of 2.3%, and will probably peak at just 3.5% next year. By contrast, the UK's unemployment rate was 4.6% in April. Still, he and others see reasons for concern, and that's because Russia appears to have entered a period of inflation rate was 9.9% in the year to April, partly due to Western sanctions pushing up the price of imports, but also because of worker shortages which have driven up country lacked around 2.6 million workers at the end of 2024, according to Russia's Higher School of Economics, largely due to men going to war or fleeing abroad to avoid central bank put interest rates up to record levels this year to try and tame the rising prices - but it's making it more costly for companies to raise the capital they need to Russia's oil and gas revenues have fallen due to sanctions and weaker pricing, and were down by 35% year-on-year in May, according to official figures. It has contributed to a widening budget shortfall that has left the country with less to spend on infrastructure and public services."They have this large pot of expenditure for the military that can't be touched," says András Tóth-Czifra, a political analyst and Russia watcher. "So it means money is starting to be reallocated from vital investment projects in road, rail and utilities."The quality of provision is really suffering."Russia may have coped better than expected with Western sanctions, but they continue to drag on the economy, he adds. Russian companies are struggling to import the technology they need, and it has badly damaged the car industry. The EU has also banned imports of Russian coal and diversified away from its gas with a view to phasing out imports by 2027. "None of this is likely to seriously impede Russia's ability to wage war in the short-term," says Mr Tóth-Czifra. "But it could affect the economy's ability to grow or diversify in years to come."So far the Kremlin has brushed off the concerns. In early June, spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the "macroeconomic stability" and "underlying strength" of the Russian economy were plain to April, meanwhile, he said the economy was "developing quite successfully" thanks to government policies. It is hard to say what will happen Ukraine and Russia reach a peace deal this year, which is not unfeasible, it would relieve some of the pressure on Moscow. US President Donald Trump has stated his desire to normalise relations and even forge new economic Europe may well "stay the course" and maintain its own sanctions in the event of peace, says Dr Katja Yafimava from the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies."Even if it doesn't, it's next to impossible to see a sort of big return to Europe buying Russian oil and gas as was the case before 2022, although a modest return of gas imports is possible," she adds."Still, this would paint a difficult economic picture for Moscow. While Russia has mostly re-orientated its oil exports away from Europe, it is more difficult to do so for gas."Whatever happens, it looks like the war will have long-term costs for Russia - and the Kremlin is running out of ways to offset them.

The Herald Scotland

an hour ago

• The Herald Scotland

Our industrial decline gives a lie to Better together claims

The collateral damage has been massive with whole communities, dependent on these jobs, being virtually abandoned. The subsequent social damage is all too obvious with the skilled jobs that sustained previous generations being replaced by a gig economy characterised by short-term, poorly-paid and often unskilled work. The consequences are there in plain sight – growing levels of poverty, lengthening queues at food banks and the scandal of children going to school poorly clothed and hungry. Of course, a healthy economy depends to a certain extent on inward investment but over the last decades the ownership of a whole host of British companies has moved overseas. Scotland has been hit particularly hard with the loss of control over our once-famous banking and finance sectors. Scottish Power and SSE are largely owned by Iberdola and a Qatari investment company. While foreign capital investment must be welcomed, it brings with it the constant threat of closures and asset-stripping. Regrettably however, it is not just our industrial and financial sectors that have been taken over but vast sections of our utilities and public services as well. In a famous speech in 1964, Harold Wilson slammed the Tories for glorying in a country "where the rewards go to land racketeers and property spivs". It was Neil Kinnock who described the then Conservative government's privatisation policies as "selling off the family silver". However successive governments both Tory and Labour have overseen vast swathes of our public services falling into private hands. So, for example, there are now 27 separate rail companies operating in England and Wales and 10 water companies. The long-suffering public have experienced worsening standards of service and ever-mounting costs while huge bonuses and dividends are being paid out to bosses and shareholders. What makes the situation even worse is that the Government pays out vast sums in subsidies to these failing companies. When you consider that in England large sections of welfare, care, probation, prisons, schools and even the NHS are now in private hands then it is no wonder that our national debt continues to soar while public complaints about failing standards rocket. Is this really the future promised by the Better Together campaign? Eric Melvin, Edinburgh. Read more letters Indy would mean 'normal' politics John NE Rankin (Letters, June 20) is obviously a stickler for accuracy. He castigates attributing the "ongoing ferry shambles" to Calmac rather than Caledonian Marine Assets Ltd and, ultimately in Mr Rankin's opinion, the SNP Government. He cannot then resist taking a swipe at supporters of this government, which he says "could not run a country". Whether or not the SNP could successfully run an independent Scotland is a matter of opinion. What is a matter of fact, however, is that Mr Rankin's opinion of the SNP would be tested by the Scottish electorate in all subsequent elections post-independence. The SNP would stand or fall on its record of government alone. In other words, we would have "normal" politics where voting would be dominated by the same concerns as every other Western European democracy. And, oh yes, the Scottish electorate would not have its near neighbour's choice imposed on it by sheer weight of numbers. David S McCartney, Forres. Make Scotland a beacon for peace Watching the latest developments in the Middle East war from Scotland can make you feel depressed and powerless. Yet Scotland is involved, and should be taking a strong stance against the war. Firstly Scotland is acting as a staging post for the US bombing missions in Iran and their assistance to Israel's war. Prestwick Airport, which is owned by the Scottish Government, has seen large numbers of US war plans landing and being refuelled on their way to wage war on Iran and to assist the Israeli war effort. It's time the Scottish Government closed this route for war by banning US warplanes at Prestwick. Secondly if this war in the Middle East extends to a global war Scotland's nuclear base at Faslane will be the number one target for attack and if it's hit then much of Glasgow will disappear surely it's time that this expensive and ineffective nuclear base was closed. Thirdly Scottish arms industries are supplying the Israeli war machines with vital spare parts and it's time this was ended. Of course I realise that none of this can be achieved while Scotland is part of the UK and where Keir Starmer's Labour Government is guilty of failing to condemn Israel for genocide in Gaza or the US for its warlike interventions' instead they are grovelling to Donal Trump in the hope of crumbs from his table. Support for Scottish independence has reached a new high of 56% recently. Now let's turn that into a pro-independence majority in the Scottish elections next year. If that happens the Scottish Parliament should declare our independence and end our complicity in war and instead make Scotland a beacon for peace in the world. Hugh Kerr, Edinburgh. • I'm an idiot. I admit it. I believed Donald Trump when he said before his election that there would be no more of America's endless wars far from America's shores. Instead he has thrown in his lot with America's triad of evil – the military industrial complex, the Neocons, and the powerful Israeli lobby. Benjamin Netanyahu, facing three charges of corruption at home, has achieved his long-held ambition of bringing the United States into a war with Iran. Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine. He hasn't. He promised to bring peace to the Middle East. He hasn't. Instead he has continued with his country's history of bombing countries and killing thousands. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Vietnam. Cambodia. Laos. Iraq. Somalia. Libya. Syria. Yemen. Iran. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. William Loneskie, Lauder. Donald Trump (Image: PA)Give us back our licence fee BBC Scotland boasts that Scotland gets 90% of its licence fee for funding. Given the heavy Anglo-centric bias of the BBC platforms funded by the UK-wide licence fee (BBC News 24, Radios 4 and 5 etc), why don't we have 100% of our licence fee back, and use it in Scotland to make programmes relevant to us, our history and culture? Scots traversed Europe for 500 years, then the globe for the next 300, so it need not be parochial. There is also income from BBC Commercial, which brings in a couple of billion pounds a year. Why does Scotland not share in that? GR Weir, Ochiltree. Politicising the bus pass The US Government's cackhanded launch of a 'Trump card' golden visa scheme, its promotional card bearing the visage and signature of that country's current elected head of state, conflates state functions with the personal identity of an incumbent officeholder. That sort of nonsense befits authoritarian tyrannies not democracies Sadly but somehow not surprisingly, the shambles echoes the sorry state of Scotland's bus passes. Rather than simply calling them bus passes, as happened for decades, the separatist regional government emblazons them with the crux decussata. They carry the irrelevant legend 'Saltire cards' (not even their formal name), predictably stylised without a space. English bus passes are at least more suitably named to reflect their purpose. They do bear a St George's Cross though: Scottish separatists' divisive identity politics have spread poison down south, alas. Ought one, though, to call Scotland's bus passes merely 'bus passes'? The scheme's website describes what is properly known as the national entitlement card as 'Scotland's National Smartcard', again grammatically wrong as well as ideologically questionable. In principle, enabling some local government services to be offered digitally could be a helpful move. But an overtly politicised design combined with the Orwellian whiff of identity cards introduced by the back door bear the grubby fingerprints of nationalist authoritarianism. Witness their unthinking use on buses even by primary school pupils. Christopher Ruane, Lanark.

The Herald Scotland

an hour ago

• The Herald Scotland

Vested interests killed new national park - SNP should be ashamed

One of the key characteristics of the debate over the Park was inaccurate information in the media, which was distributed to residents via mail-drops. We noticed a similarity to the campaign against the deposit return scheme, another one of Action to Protect Rural Scotland's key areas of work, which was also subject to a campaign to discredit it. These tactics have, once again, proved extremely effective, and the plans for a new National Park in Galloway have been axed. A detailed look at the consultation analysis confirms that the anti-campaign had an insidious impact on the outcome. The Government made the decision to scrap the Park, despite their knowledge that most of the arguments being used against the National Park had no basis in evidence, whereas the arguments used in support were generally evidence–based. Read more Worse than this, the Scottish Government used the consultation process as a numbers game, something that consultations are not designed to do. Consultations are used to gather information about complex policy proposals, and, in this case, a proposal with a number of options: for the area that Park would cover, powers of the Park, governance arrangements, among other things. This consultation, though, has been used as a de facto referendum by the Scottish Government in their decision making, as evidenced by the Cabinet Secretary emphasising the exact numbers from the consultation response, despite the NatureScot report cautioning against the approach in their report. This problem was compounded by the Scottish Government failing to weigh any of the answers according to whether their objections to a National Park had a basis in fact. NatureScot reported that the core of the opposition was based on concerns over the potential negative impact of the Park but then said. 'We would note that many of these issues raised in the responses to the consultation are not supported by strong evidence of how existing National Parks in Scotland operate, or more detailed consideration of how a National Park could be tailored to Southwest Scotland to address these concerns.' In their detailed analysis of the reasons that respondents gave for being 'for' or 'against' the proposed Park, NatureScot assessed that 10 out of the 12 perceived drawbacks were not backed up by evidence, and two were uncertain. Campaigners worried about the impact of the Park on the region's economy (Image: free) These two are both about the impact of future wind development, which is classed as uncertain due to the Government signalling an intention to change policy in new National Parks. On the other hand, of the ten perceived benefits of National Parks in the consultation responses, 8 were judged to have strong or good evidence, and one a medium evidence base. It seems like a significant proportion of the people responding to the consultation have been persuaded by incorrect information. The Scottish Government, for whom supporting existing and new National Parks, is stated policy, failed to correct this tidal wave of inaccurate information before it had totally swamped all discussions of the National Park in Galloway. This left three voluntary organisations: Galloway National Park Association, the Scottish Campaign for National Parks (SCNP) and ourselves with the impossible task of trying to get the evidence-base out there, with our tiny resources (SCNP and APRS share one day a week of funded officer time dedicated to National Parks, GNPA have none). That the Government allowed misinformation to take hold, and then, to make things worse, converted the consultation into a de facto referendum, is totally at variance with the way in which Government policy should be consulted on and delivered. NatureScot themselves, in their reports, counselled against treating the consultation as a numbers game saying, among other things, 'treating these results as definitive is problematic' and 'Nor was the survey designed to be a simple poll. Our experience with the aftermath of the cancellation of the Deposit Return Scheme suggests that the Scottish Government will find that cancelling the new National Park will not draw a line under the issue. The deposit return scheme was cancelled, rather than going ahead without glass, which they could have done under the terms of the Internal Markets Act. This turned out to be the start of a whole new set of problems. It led to a loss of £8 million due to the bankruptcy of Circularity Scotland, being sued by Biffa for £200 million, and now they are having to implement a deposit return scheme without glass three years after it could have happened, while setting up all the structures once again, but burdened by a lack of trust from business resulting from the U-turn. Read more Similarly this will not be the end of the pressures from the anti-park campaign. Those who opposed the new National Park: the landed interests, farmers, forestry companies and huge power companies will be emboldened by this win. They won't be stop with taking down a Galloway National Park. The Government has to face up to the fact that anything that clearly benefits the environment but potentially reduces profits for vested interests attracts a powerful anti-lobby. This is no different from public health in areas such as tobacco, alcohol and processed food. Any government supposedly committed to stopping and reversing biodiversity loss needs to stand firm on positive change. Civil society, also, should be alert to the tactics that have been used to bring down the Galloway National Park. If the Scottish Government can't muster the energy to get a policy with such cross-party support, as a National Park over the line, how will we make the far more challenging changes we will need to stave off the nature and climate emergencies? Dr Kat Jones is the Director of Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) which has been campaigning for more national parks for Scotland since 2013