Currently, renovations in the EU countries are only reducing annual energy consumption by 1%, according to the European Commission. This month, EU lawmakers passed a directive on building energy efficiency, mandating hefty renovations for property owners to curb carbon emissions and energy consumption. The development will be gradual – it will last more than a decade – but property owners who lag behind risk being burdened with assets that can no longer be sold or rented. The directive aims to compel property owners to undertake large-scale renovations to improve the environmental characteristics of buildings across Europe and ensure that the bloc meets its commitments under the Paris Agreement of Dec. 2015, to combat climate change and to accelerate and intensify the actions and investments needed for a sustainable low carbon future. Currently, renovations in the EU countries are only reducing annual energy consumption by 1%, according to the European Commission. To meet its climate requirements, the EU says property owners must increase renovation spending by 275 billion euros annually. The new European law on energy efficiency is likely to impact tens of thousands of buildings across the entire region. By 2033, property owners will need to have renovated one quarter of the largest energy-consuming buildings in the EU, what is more, by 2030, all new buildings must be emissions-free. In the EU, around 85% of buildings predating 2000 are major energy consumers, relying heavily on fossil fuels for heating and cooling. The EU targets a 60% emissions reduction in this sector by 2030. Source: tovima.com
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THIS weekend marks a quarter-century since a landmark act of aggression — Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia, which began on March 24 1999. The war is often presented as a success. An easy war in the honeymoon period of Tony Blair’s premiership, before it was clear he would be associated, more than anything else, with war, through the longer, bloodier conflicts he threw Britain into in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is misleading. Nato’s air war involved three months of intensive bombing. Our bombers pulverised barracks, bridges, roads: but also schools, hospitals, homes. Thousands were killed. As the US academic Noam Chomsky noted, it was a war justified by misleading propaganda: that Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic was engaged in ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians. In fact ethnic clashes had claimed scores of lives in Kosovo in the preceding year, but these included massacres of Kosovar Serb civilians by the Kosovo Liberation Army as well as Serb militia attacks on Albanians, and the bombing prompted a massive escalation in such bloodshed. As so often since, a complex local conflict involving ethnic and religious differences was exploited by imperialist powers to further their own geopolitical goals — in this case, the final break-up of the once multinational socialist state of Yugoslavia — who pitched it to people back home as a battle between good and evil. That complex local conflict has not been resolved. Nato carved an independent Kosovo out of Yugoslav territory, but drawing borders on ethnic lines rarely works to everyone’s satisfaction, and Kosovo now includes separatist Serb-majority areas — whose residents rioted and attacked the garrisons Nato still maintains there last spring. Nato’s war had consequences way beyond south-east Europe. It showed hopes were in vain that the end of the cold war would bring a “peace dividend” and the diversion of arms spending into socially more useful channels. Instead, the United States used its “unipolar moment” following the fall of the Soviet Union to assert its will by force wherever it wanted. Yugoslavia was the first in the sequence that Joe Biden later dubbed the “forever wars.” Washington, with London loyally in tow, would proceed to set fire to Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, fuel and fund conflicts in Syria and Yemen, and murder thousands of people across the world in drone attacks. International law went out the window, with the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” allowing any state strong enough to violate the UN Charter whenever it claimed the moral right. How partial these questions become, once the law no longer counts, is shown by Russia adopting precisely the justification Nato used in Kosovo — protecting an ethnic minority — to march troops into the Donbass two years ago. Many of the conventions by which armies had been supposed to behave since the second world war were dropped. Nato openly admitted to targeting civilians, most notoriously by bombing the Radio Television of Serbia HQ, killing 16 people, arguing its role broadcasting Serbian propaganda made it a legitimate target. This formalised the treatment of journalists as enemy combatants, something which has placed journalists in warzones at heightened risk ever since. Washington’s unipolar moment has passed. But the frenetic aggression of the US and its allies, Britain above all, in those years not only killed millions, it inured our politicians to seeing war as the normal state of affairs, the constant backdrop to our political life. That explains their blasé attitude to the prolonged slaughter in Ukraine. After the drawn-out morasses of Iraq and Afghanistan, endless military action without any real prospect of achieving anything we might define as victory is nothing new. And the casual use of military force against weak countries, that cannot hit back, has bred a dangerous complacency, one that sees our political leaders openly moot war with great powers like Russia and China — war on a scale that could end life as we know it. (morningstar) History knows many events which, by virtue of their profound impact on the international order, marked a change of eras. The NATO attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999 is certainly one such event. It went beyond being a tragic milestone in the life of the Serbian people with thousands of ruined lives and desecrated national dignity, and included a devastating blow to international law and European security foundations that had been laid after World War II. The United States and the EU got finally convinced in their own impunity and moral superiority which was bad news for those who prefer to choose their own path rather than become someone’s tool in their efforts to realise their own interests. The strategic balance of power collapsed, and a drawn-out crisis of international relations ensued which continues to worsen. The US and its allies who assaulted a peaceful European country trampled on the UN Charter and the CSCE/OSCE principles, and desecrated the very notion of sovereignty. They have thus made it clear that they will stoop to anything, including radioactive contamination of vast swathes of land, to achieve global dominance. The widespread use of depleted uranium munitions by NATO has led to a multifold increase in cancer cases in that region, contaminated the environment where millions of people had lived for many years, and went down in history as a separate dark chapter on the list of NATO crimes. During the 78 days of military aggression 14,000 bombs were dropped on Yugoslavia and over 2,000 missiles were fired, including cluster and demolition shells. Under the mocking front of a “humanitarian intervention,” mostly civilian targets were hit, including residential districts, hospitals, schools, bridges, mass transit vehicles, and refugee convoys. Thousands of civilians were killed, including 89 children, whom the Western coalition cynically referred to as “collateral damage.” No one has ever been held accountable for these atrocities, and international justice turned a deaf ear to the suffering of the Serbs and let NATO atrocities go unnoticed. Not only the bombed-out buildings of the Yugoslav General Staff and Defence Ministry in central Belgrade which irritate the US officials to this day remind us of those terrible days. Serbia has many other unhealed wounds. A portion of the country’s ancestral territory, Kosovo and Metohija, has been forcibly taken away. The West has taken under its wing terrorists from the Kosovo Liberation Army, gave the province the status of a pseudo-state, and encourages the expulsion of the indigenous Serbian population. This inevitably begs the question: was the “Kosovo project” worth the sacrifice and destruction that the alliance brought upon Yugoslavia? Has the self-proclaimed “republic” added stability or prosperity to the Balkan region? There is no doubt that the United States’ concern for the rights of Kosovo Albanians is a fake claim from the get-go. It is nothing but a false pretext for the crackdown on Serbs. The West’s goal was to turn the provisional self-governing bodies in Pristina into a tool for anti-Serb ethnic cleansing and a festering trouble spot to put pressure on Belgrade. At the end of the day, the Kosovo settlement is in a deadlock, and the situation on the ground threatens to escalate into an armed conflict. This is what the Western “peacemaking” is all about. Its disastrous ramifications can now be seen in Ukraine, where a neo-Nazi regime has been nurtured on the basis of Washington and its supporters’ rejection of the principles of equality and mutual respect in international affairs, a regime that committed genocide against the Russian population and plunged the country into a military face-off. We can hear the US and the EU increasingly call on Serbs to “turn the page” and forgive NATO for the invasion that took place 25 years ago. On top of that, they lay the bulk of the blame on the Serbs for the dramatic events during the breakup of Yugoslavia, including the 1999 bombing attacks. I’d be hard pressed to find proper words to describe the extent of Western shamelessness and lack of self-criticism. The Alliance will never be able to wash off the shame of war crimes. No one believes its demagoguery about defending freedom and democracy anymore. The United States and the rest of NATO have no right whatsoever to talk about implementing an obscure new “rules-based order.” Their every effort to put together some kind of “global security architecture” is by definition malevolent and toxic, and aimed solely at perpetrating the neocolonial hegemony of the West. Russia and its partners in Belgrade will continue to oppose the attempts to distort the history of the Yugoslav crisis and to shift the emphasis to demonising Serbs and justifying the 1999 aggression. The attempts to insult the memory of the innocent victims of NATO hangmen are unacceptable. (The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation) Twenty five years ago, Zoltan Dani achieved a miraculous military feat: wielding outdated missile equipment, his army unit shot down an American F117 "stealth fighter" flying over Serbia as part of NATO's 1999 air strike assault. The David-vs-Goliath victory was one of the most surprising achievements of the Serbian side as it was battered by NATO bombs that began dropping 20 years ago on Sunday, in a bid to halt Belgrade's war with Kosovo. But in perhaps an even more remarkable twist, the retired army officer is now close friends with the American pilot whose Nighthawk he brought down. "Bingo," Dani, now 67, recalls saying when he first learned he had struck the American aircraft, which was touted as invisible to radar. ADVERTISINGThe downing of the F117 three days into the NATO assault earned Dani national hero status. It was the first and only time a F117 has been shot down in combat, leading celebratory Serbs to print shirts and posters with the slogan: "We didn't know it was invisible!" After three months of air strikes, Serbia was forced to withdraw its troops from Kosovo, where its forces had been battling ethnic Albanian separatists. While the NATO intervention is celebrated as the basis of Kosovans' liberation today, traumatic memories of the bombs remain deeply etched in Serbia's public memory. But Dani and his US counterpart, Air Force pilot Dale Zelko, managed to put their past behind them. Around a decade ago, they started exchanging emails. "It was important, among other things, to learn what kind of man he was," Dani, who is part of Serbia's Hungarian minority, told AFP from his home in eastern Skorenovac. "After two to three years we decided together that it was time to meet." - 'Message of peace' - That 2012 encounter, filmed in a documentary called 'The Second Meeting', saw Zelko travel to Dani's home where he had opened a bakery after retiring from military service. "When he arrived... I handed him an apron, he took it and we worked together," recalls Dani with a grin. In the documentary, the two men are seen rolling out pastry dough together before visiting a Serbian museum where tattered pieces of the F117 are on display. "Hey, that's my stuff," Zelko jokes, pointing at the display. They also visit the field where the American pilot landed after he ejected from his aircraft in a parachute. "As soon as I saw those missiles I thought, oh man, they got me," Zelko says standing in the field. At a screening of the film in Belgrade in 2012, Zelko addressed the room. "I am sorry for your suffering and sorrow, loss and anguish," he said, visibly shaken. "War is not between normal, average people, it is between the governments," he added. Dani says he was initially hesitant about making contact with his former war foe, but ultimately decided it would "be an opportunity to send a common message of peace and understanding". The following year he visited Zelko and his family at their home in New Hampshire. Now they still talk "once or twice a week by email", reports Dani. Near his computer is a large chunk of dark metal -- another recovered piece of the F117 -- leaning against the wall. ? AFP Italy's prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is seeking €100,000 (£85,374) in damages after deepfake porn videos of her were uploaded online. Ms Meloni is due to testify before a court in the Sardinian city of Sassari on 2 July. A deepfake image is one where the face of one person is digitally added to the body of another. A 40-year-old man, thought to have produced the videos, and his 73-year-old father are under investigation. Police have said they were able to find them by tracking down the mobile device that was used to post the videos. Both men are accused of defamation. Under Italian law, some defamation cases can be criminal and carry a custodial sentence. According to the indictment, the videos were posted on a US pornographic website, where they were viewed "millions of times" over the course of several months. Ms Meloni's legal team has said that, if her request for damages is successful, she will donate the €100,000 to a fund to support women who have been victims of male violence. Maria Giulia Marongiu, Ms Meloni's lawyer, said the sum was "symbolic" and the demand for compensation was meant to "send a message to women who are victims of this kind of abuse of power not to be afraid to press charges." The deepfake videos of Ms Meloni date back to before she was appointed prime minister in 2022. In recent years, deepfake porn has become commonplace on the internet. Victims have spoken about the trauma of seeing their faces digitally edited onto photos of women in sexually explicit scenes. (BBC) |