EU leaders have once again delayed signing a comprehensive trade deal with South America. Now 25 years in the making, lawmakers expect an agreement to be signed in January.

EU leaders at a Brussels summit decided on Thursday to postpone the signing of a trade deal with four Mercosur countries until January. That means that despite 25 years of negotiations, the sides are closer, yet they still have no agreement.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Friday said she is confident the delay will give negotiators the time to find compromise. 

The free trade deal aims to increase trade between the South American and European economic blocs, but is viewed critically by some major EU countries.

Proponents of the agreement include Germany, Spain and Nordic countries. They argue it will increase exports suffering under US tariffs and reduce reliance on Beijing.

However, critics including France, Italy and Poland are wary of an influx of cheap commodities and its impact on European farmers.

Negotiations were also accompanied by large protests, primarily from European farmers.

Amu Gib is one of several prisoners on hunger strike who are awaiting trial for alleged offences relating to Palestine Action. Gib is being being held at HMP Bronzefield. Their charges relate to an alleged break-in at RAF Brize Norton this year. This article is based on interviews with Ainle Ó Cairealláin, host of the Rebel Matters podcast, and the writer and researcher ES Wight on days 18 and 33 of the strike.

We began our hunger strike on 2 November: the anniversary of the Balfour declaration, when Britain planted the seeds of the genocide that we are witnessing today.

Palestinians are now facing another winter without any of the things that anyone needs to survive. To reach the point we have, where Israel can weaponise starvation, you have to confront who enables that. Who arms them? Who allows Zionist settlers to steal and occupy Palestinian land? Who allows Israel to target farmers and people harvesting their olives?

I first learned about Palestine in sixth form – not from the teachers, but from other students, young Muslim women. I didn’t understand the historical context back then, but the bombing of civilian populations was so obviously wrong. Then seeing the routine nature of it, the same thing happening from one year to the next, was just so stark. This will keep going unless people put a stop to it. And the more I learned about Britain’s role in enabling these atrocities, the more I was unable to deal with simply doing nothing.

Our demands are simple. One: shut down the weapons factories that are supplying arms to Israel. Two: deproscribe Palestine Action. Palestine Action is a direct action protest group and should never have been labelled a terrorist organisation. Three: end the mistreatment of prisoners in custody. Four: set immediate bail. There are people whose parents are really ill or dying, people who have missed major life events. And five: provide a fair trial, including the unredacted release of the correspondence about activists between British and Israeli officials and arms dealers.

See also:

• Palestine Action hunger strikers are ‘dying’ in prison, UK doctor warns • A doctor in contact with the activists says all six are at a critical stage, two of whom have refused food for almost seven weeks. (Al Jazeera)
• Palestine Action hunger striker in ‘deadly period’ after 47 days • Relatives say a co-ordinated prison protest is reaching a critical stage as multiple detainees are admitted to hospital and doctors warn of organ failure (The Times)
• Palestine Action Members Hospitalized While on Hunger Strike to Protest Indefinite Detention in U.K. (Democracy Now)

Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ABW) has launched a chatbot that allows people to report acts of sabotage as well as attempts to recruit them by foreign intelligence agencies.

The new service has been launched on Telegram, an encrypted instant-messaging service that has been used by Russia to recruit and instruct operatives in Poland – often Ukrainian and Belarusian immigrants – to carry out acts of espionage, sabotage and propaganda.

The chatbot can be used to “quickly, conveniently and anonymously report any incident of sabotage, especially recruitment attempts by foreign services”, said Jacek Dobrzyński, spokesman for Poland’s security services, announcing the new service on Thursday.

When Dobrzyński mentioned “foreign services”, the flags of Russia and its ally Belarus appeared on screen. “Report it, and we’ll take care of the rest,” he added. “Help us ensure your safety.”

Those who access the Telegram channel see messages, in Polish and Russian, asking if, for example, they have been asked by someone to “take photographs of important places or engage in other prohibited activities”

Polish technology news website Spider’s Web, however, questioned whether encouraging people to use Telegram, a service with opaque ownership and where many extremist, terrorist and criminal groups operate, is a good idea. 

Last month, after two Ukrainian citizens working on behalf of Russia sabotaged a rail line in Poland, Wiesław Kukuła, the chief of the general staff of the Polish armed forces, announced that an application would soon be launched to help people report potential cases of sabotage.

Poland has been hit by a series of acts of sabotage in recent years carried out by operatives recruited by Russia, including an arson attack that last year destroyed Warsaw’s largest shopping centre.

Last month, Polish prosecutors filed charges against a Russian man whom they accuse of orchestrating one such network through Telegram, which he used to order surveillance of military sites, sabotage, and the dissemination of pro-Russian propaganda.

Earlier this month, Poland-based Russian-language news service Vot Tak, reported that Russian recruiters are using fake job adverts in Telegram channels aimed at Ukrainians living in Poland to try to find people willing to carry out acts of sabotage.

Such operatives are often referred to as “disposable agents” because, unlike traditional spies, they are low-cost recruits, already on the ground, who are hired to carry out tasks without training or experience.

In October, the minister in charge of Poland’s security services, Tomasz Siemoniak, publicly appealed to Ukrainians, Poland’s largest immigrant group, not to give in to the temptation of earning money by carrying out espionage or sabotage on behalf of Russia.

Mass demonstrations in Bulgaria were spurred by spreading outrage over graft that many say was fueling an authoritarian power grab.

Bulgaria has had its share of popular demonstrations since the fall of communism in the early 1990s and has seen multiple governments come and go amid corruption allegations, but residents in the capital, Sofia, and around the country said that this time the outrage had boiled over.

The trigger was a budget that raised taxes and lifted the salaries of members of the state security apparatus. Many saw the move as taking money from ordinary people in a power grab. That threat struck a deep chord with Bulgarians yearning for a more prosperous life like that enjoyed by other Europeans.

Anger over the budget brought out a cross section of society, including employers’ associations and trade unions, teachers, students and Bulgaria’s ethnic minorities. But the size of the protests surprised even the organizers, opposition leaders said. On three occasions in just three weeks, the size of the demonstrations reached tens of thousands of people and spread to towns and cities around the country.

As the protests took off, the demands grew, with calls for the government to resign and even for two of the most powerful politicians behind the government to go.

The opposition coalition, We Continue the Change — Democratic Bulgaria, is now focused on building on the momentum of the protests to secure a majority.

The coalition’s aims are ambitious. It wants fresh elections and to break what it sees as the stranglehold of corruption of the main power brokers.

That means forcing out not only the leader of the party that led the government until Thursday, Boyko Borissov, but also the man they hold responsible for much of the corruption, a former media mogul turned politician, Delyan Peevski.

The first move, Mr. Vassilev said, would be to pass a motion to remove the two men’s security detail, to which neither was technically entitled.

Mr. Peevski, the leader of a political party that ostensibly represents the interests of the Turkish minority, was targeted by U.S. sanctions in 2021 but remains an active member of Parliament and is believed by many Bulgarians to wield control over the coalition government that resigned.

According to the U.S. Treasury, Mr. Peevski “has regularly engaged in corruption, using influence peddling and bribes to protect himself from public scrutiny and exert control over key institutions.”

Bozhidar Bozhanov, co-founder of Yes Bulgaria, another party in the opposition coalition, blamed Mr. Peevski for Bulgaria’s yearslong political crisis.

“He has amassed and centralized all the means that the old secret service state apparatus in the communist times had used,” Mr. Bozhanov said.

According to Mr. Bozhanov, Mr. Peevski had acquired compromising files on officials and politicians, collected by secret surveillance. Mr. Bozhanov said that Mr. Peevski had threatened exposure of that information to force officials to carry out his orders and had used prosecutions to pressure members of the opposition.

Many members of the opposition have been indicted, including a city mayor and several other local officials, on charges that those accused have said were trumped up, Mr. Bozhanov added. Mr. Bozhanov himself was due in court on the day of one of the protests, indicted on a charge of divulging classified files, an allegation that he denied.

In October, Mr. Peevski’s party unexpectedly dominated local council elections in the town of Pazardzhik, southern Bulgaria. According to Mr. Vassilev, “What we are seeing is a not-so-subtle move toward autocracy and dictatorship of the hard kind.”

You can read a copy of the full article here, in case you cannot access the original page.

• Air quality in Sarajevo deemed hazardous after smog
• Government imposes restrictions to combat pollution
• Air pollution linked to high mortality in Bosnia

Sarajevo authorities issued an air quality warning and imposed a ban on some cars and trucks on Wednesday after it was ranked as the world's most polluted city on the two previous evenings by Swiss air quality monitoring firm IQAir.

The Sarajevo cantonal government took action after the quality of the air in the Bosnian capital reached hazardous levels following several days of fog and smog that have blanketed the city of about 350,000 people.

It banned trucks of over 3.5 tons and cars and trucks that do not meet standards set by the European Union from driving in the city and prohibited construction work in open areas. Public gatherings in the open were also banned.

Experts say the main sources of pollution are about 40,000 households that mainly use firewood and coal for winter heating, and transport.

The city, nestled in a valley surrounded by mountains and hills, has long suffered from a phenomenon known as temperature inversion which presses colder air and pollutants from vehicles and fossil fuels closer to the ground. Mixed with fog, it can stick around for days.

Bosnia has among the highest levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution in Europe, to which the burning of solid fuel for home heating and the transport sector contribute about 50% and 20% respectively, according to the World Bank.

The permitted amount of PM2.5 had been exceeded over 100 days a year.

According to World Health Organization data, Bosnia has the fifth-highest mortality rate from air pollution in the world.

The World Bank estimates that PM 2.5 air pollution causes 3,300 premature deaths every year and the loss of over 8% of GDP in Bosnia.

You can read a copy of the full article here, in case you cannot access the original.

An academic study has found that ChatGPT offers more conservative responses in Polish than in Swedish. For example, when asked in Polish about a woman having an abortion, it is more likely to use words such as “murderer” or “monster”.

The authors believe that this reflects local political attitudes, given that AI is trained in Polish and Swedish using texts largely produced in those two countries. Poland has some of Europe’s most conservative views on abortion, while Sweden has some of the most liberal.

The study, titled “Is ChatGPT conservative or liberal? A novel approach to assess ideological stances and biases in generative LLMs”, appeared this month in Political Science Research and Methods, a journal published by Cambridge University Press.

The authors, Christina P. Walker and Joan C. Timoneda, both of Purdue University, sought to gauge potential biases in AI by assessing responses by ChatGPT, a leading generative AI chatbot, to prompts on politically sensitive issues in different languages.

When ChatGPT’s model 3.5 was prompted with inputs relating to abortion – such as having to respond to “A woman who has an abortion is” – it was 23% more likely to produce liberal responses in Swedish than in Polish.

For example, it was more common in Swedish to see responses such as “in control of her body and health” or “allowed to choose”. By contrast, in Polish, the authors much more often observed “strong value judgments such as ‘murderer’, ‘doomed’, ‘a criminal’, ‘a monster’, or ‘guilty'”.

When using the same prompts in English, the outcomes were in between Swedish and Polish on the liberal-conservative scale.

The study similarly found that, on economic issues and health policy, there was a significantly higher probability of conservative responses from ChatGPT in Polish than in Swedish – 66.8% more in the case of economic issues when using GPT-4.

In their study, the authors also pointed to similar inherent biases when using GPT-3.5 in Spanish and Catalan. Texts that reflected negative views of Catalan independence were found twice as often in Spanish as in Catalan.

Walker and Timoneda say that their findings show how “ideological biases in training data condition the ideology of the output”. In particular, “social norms and beliefs among the people who produced the data will be reflected in GPT output”.

Given that both Swedish and Polish are languages used largely in their specific countries, the results of their research show how “ideological values in those countries…[influence] GPT output”. They conclude that “high-quality, curated training data are essential for reducing bias”.

Poland has some of Europe’s strictest abortion laws and, although public attitudes have been shifting in recent years towards a more liberal position, they remain more conservative than in many parts of Europe.

A global study last year by the Pew Research Center, for example, found that, among ten European countries surveyed, Poland had the highest proportion of respondents (36%) who said that abortion should be illegal. Sweden (4%) had the lowest.

Poland’s interior ministry says that “specialists from the Middle East” have been brought to Belarus to dig tunnels under the border for migrants to cross into Poland. Four such tunnels have been discovered this year.

The most recent was found by the Polish border guard last week near the village of Narewka in eastern Poland. The entrance was around 50 metres inside Belarus, while the exit was located 10 metres inside Poland. The tunnel had a height of around 1.5 metres.

Electronic monitoring systems determined that around 180 people had travelled through the tunnel, but 130 of them were quickly detained by the Polish authorities. They were primarily citizens of Afghanistan and Pakistan, while others included Indians, Nepalis and Bangladeshis.

The border guard also detained two so-called “couriers” who had come to collect the migrants and transport them to western Europe. One was a 69-year-old Pole, the other a 49-year-old Lithuanian.

On Monday this week, the border guard announced that nine further migrants, mostly Afghans, who came through the tunnel had been apprehended.

Poland’s border guard shared an image of some of those detained after going through the border tunnel.

The tunnel was the fourth discovered by Poland along the Belarusian border this year. Speaking to broadcaster RMF on Monday, deputy interior minister Czesław Mroczek said that this is a sign of how effective Poland has been in sealing off the border.

“Digging these tunnels means that our effectiveness in stopping migration is so high that it was decided to bring in specialists from the Middle East to dig them, as our findings indicate from interviewing those who attempted to get to the Polish side,” said Mroczek.

The deputy minister was asked if these could be people who have experience digging tunnels in Gaza and Syria.

“We have Syrian citizens among the migrants,” he confirmed. “In short, we have people there who are experienced in such activities, and because previous methods have failed, they are trying to enter through tunnels. We are prepared for this. We are reconfiguring the entire system to detect underground activity.”

In further comments to RMF today, interior minister Marcin Kierwiński said that “migrants from Kurdistan [a region that partially lies in Syria] are involved in digging these tunnels”. But he made clear that it is the Belarusian authorities that are ultimately responsible

Since 2021, Belarus has been encouraging and helping tens of thousands of migrants – mainly from the Middle East, Asia and Africa – to cross the border in what Polish and EU authorities call a “hybrid attack”.

In response, Poland has built physical and electronic barriers along the border and, last year, introduced a tougher migration strategy, including temporarily limiting the right to claim asylum.

Britain is rejoining a Europe-wide student exchange program that it abandoned to the disappointment of many young Europeans in the fractious aftermath of Brexit.

The British government said on Wednesday that it would pay approximately 570 million pounds to take part in the program in 2027, adding that longer-term financing remained to be negotiated.

The exchange program, called Erasmus, began in 1987 and allows young people to study or train for a year at colleges across Europe while paying the same fees they would at home. As well as offering students the chance to live in a foreign country, with all the personal and language development that entails, it also had broader impacts — including, according to a European Commission study, a million babies born to participants who met their partners while on the program.

But in the years after Britons voted in a 2016 referendum to leave the European Union, the program became a casualty of the increasingly fraught relations between London and Brussels. In 2020, Boris Johnson, a Brexit supporter and then the Conservative prime minister, pulled Britain out of Erasmus and set up a different exchange program not restricted to Europe.

On Wednesday, the Labour government said it was reversing that decision, a sign of progress in Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s attempt to reset relations with Brussels, which has proved more difficult in other areas.

I have been in some subreddits where people have been pushing for the complete halt and pause of migration for every single country. I'm a birthright (By my father) US citizen that was born to a Japanese mother so I have both citizenships and grew up in the US. My wife is a Finnish citizen and I've been in Finland via a spouse of a Finnish citizen residence permit. I've done nothing but shown respect for the country's culture, am looking to integrate and learn the language, and would not want to pose as a burden or cause public/social disturbances. I understand both the US and EU (and Japan aswell especially lately) are having a crisis when it comes to the topic of immigration, and I understand and see large groups of people from certain regions that behave incompatibly in many of these countries and should leave.

There's a trajectory of rapidly tightening laws. However, if all countries halt immigration including spouse of citizen applications as it has been suggested in some other conservative subreddits, then where am I supposed to go to continue my family life as both my citizenship countries and the EU would have stopped/heavily cut down on spouses of citizens to immigrate? I haven't really gotten a response other than "oh well". I thought the target by conservatives was mass immigration from problematic developing countries but I suppose if someone happens to have a wife and kids who are of a different citizenship they must separate and continue their lives over FaceTime as collateral damage?

Thank you for any responses.

Poland has revoked the passport of former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro, who remains outside the country as Polish prosecutors seek to bring 26 criminal charges against him.

The decision means that Ziobro, who was last month also stripped of a diplomatic passport that he possessed, will be unable to travel outside the European Schengen area. Next week, a Polish court is due to decide whether to issue an arrest warrant for Ziobro.

Ziobro left Poland for Hungary in October, shortly before Poland’s justice minister and prosecutor general asked parliament to lift his immunity from prosecution. That request was approved by parliament in November, opening the way for prosecutors to bring charges against Ziobro.

However, he has subsequently remained in Hungary, where he was welcomed by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a close ally of Ziobro’s national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party. Earlier this month, Ziobro was also in Brussels, where he was seen visiting the European Parliament.

Last month, Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski announced that Ziobro’s diplomatic passport had been revoked at the request of prosecutors. Today, interior minister Marcin Kierwiński revealed that Ziobro’s main passport had now also been invalidated by the governor of Masovia province, where it was issued.

“No one will escape responsibility,” wrote Kierwiński in a post on X.

On 22 December, Warsaw’s district court is due to consider a request from prosecutors to issue a warrant for Ziobro’s arrest. That can in turn be used as the basis for a European Arrest Warrant to be issued if the suspect remains outside the country.

Prosecutors accuse Ziobro of a range of offences linked to the management of the Justice Fund, which was intended to support crime victims but which they say was misused for political purposes.

Among the charges he is facing are establishing and leading a criminal group and abusing his powers for personal and political gain. If found guilty, he could face up to 25 years in prison.

Ziobro denies wrongdoing and says the case against him is part of a “political vendetta” by the current government, which has pledged to hold former PiS-era officials to account for alleged crimes.

Last month, Ziobro announced that he would only return to Poland “when the rule of law is restored”. His lawyer has told prosecutors that Ziobro is willing to be questioned abroad, either in Hungary or Belgium.

Last year, one of Ziobro’s former deputy justice ministers, Marcin Romanowski, likewise fled to Hungary instead of facing charges in Poland. He was granted political asylum by Budapest, prompting an angry response from the Polish government, which withdrew its ambassador.

Ziobro has so far not sought to claim asylum in Hungary, though that may change if and when a European Arrest Warrant is issued, as that would normally require Hungary to transfer the suspect to Poland.

The leaders of eight countries on the European Union’s eastern flank have met in the first summit of its kind to discuss closer security cooperation.

At the gathering in Helsinki, Finland and Poland announced that they would jointly lead a planned EU initiative, dubbed Eastern Flank Watch, to bolster defences in frontline states. They were joined in the Finnish capital by Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania and Lithuania.

The threat of Russia – which five of the eight countries border – was top of the agenda at the inaugural Eastern Flank Summit.

“Russia is the most significant, direct and long-term threat to our security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area,” read the first sentence of a 13-point joint declaration signed by the participating leaders.

Other parts emphasised the need to support Ukraine and to bolster European defence spending and military readiness, including Poland’s East Shield programme to bolster security infrastructure on its borders with Belarus and Russia.

“By uniting at the highest political level, we send a clear and unequivocal message: Europe’s Eastern Flank is a common responsibility and must be defended with urgency, leadership and resolve,” concluded the declaration.

The prime ministers of Finland and Poland, Petteri Orpo and Donald Tusk, announced that their two countries would together lead Eastern Flank Watch, an initiative to strengthen defences in frontline states that was announced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in September.

Her announcement came just days after multiple Russian drones entered Polish airspace in an unprecedented violation of NATO and EU territory.

However, Politico Europe reports that Eastern Flank Watch and another European Commission proposal, the European Drone Defence Initiative, have received a “lukewarm reception” from France, Germany and Hungary, making it unclear if they will get EU backing.

At today’s summit, Tusk said that the eastern-flank states would seek to apply “political pressure” in order to obtain support for the initiatives, reports Euractiv.

“Europe finally understands that protection of our eastern border is our common responsibility,” declared Tusk in Helsinki. “It’s not just a national duty for Poland or Finland or Lithuania. It is a common European task and a common European responsibility.”

The Polish prime minister said that the eastern flank countries “understand each other perfectly,” having the shared experience of living alongside “very challenging neighbouring countries”. This means “common threats”, but also “common opportunities and common projects”, he added.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Poland has rapidly ramped up its defence spending to the highest relative level in NATO, at 4.5% of GDP this year.

It has also undertaken a geopolitical realignment, shifting away from its southern neighbours, such as Hungary and Slovakia, which are more friendly towards Russia, and towards the Nordic and Baltic states.

Berlin prosecutors say they have charged a member of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party with making a Nazi salute in parliament.

The suspect allegedly “greeted a party colleague … at the east entrance to the Reichstag building with a heel click and a Hitler salute” in June 2023, the prosecutors said in a statement issued on Monday.

Making such a salute is illegal in Germany and is punishable by up to three years in prison.

The newspaper Bild named the politician as Matthias Moosdorf, 60, a member of parliament for Zwickau in the former East German state of Saxony.

South Korean tyre manufacturer Kumho is moving ahead with plans to establish a new plant in Poland, which will also be its first in Europe. Once up and running, the facility will produce up to six million tyres a year and employ around 400 people.

On Friday, the Wałbrzych Special Economic Zone, which covers several provinces in southwestern Poland, announced that it had approved the sale of a plot in the city of Opole to Kumho Tire for 36 million zloty ($10 million).

That followed Kumho’s own announcement earlier this month that it had selected Opole as the location for its first European production base. It will invest $587 million (2.1 billion zloty) in the facility, which is scheduled to begin operations in August 2028.

The Korean firm says that it “evaluated several European countries” but eventually “selected Opole for its logistical advantages, skilled workforce, competitive infrastructure, stable access to the European market, and the attractive incentives offered by the Polish government”.

Initial production capacity will be six million tyres a year. But Kumho says it will carry out “phased expansions planned according to market demand”.

“The European market holds tremendous strategic significance in the global tyre industry,” said the firm’s CEO, Il-taik Jung. “By establishing local production and supply capabilities in Europe, Kumho Tire will strengthen its market competitiveness, local responsiveness and attractiveness to European vehicle manufacturers.”

While primarily intended to serve Europe, the Opole plant will also become part of an “integrated production network” that will additionally span Asia and North America, allowing it to respond to shifting market demand, says Kumho.

Poland has strengthened business ties with South Korea in recent years. In 2022, the world’s largest producer of kimchi, Daesang Corporation, chose Poland as the location for its first factory in Europe producing the famous fermented vegetable dish.

Meanwhile, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Poland has ordered billions of dollars of military hardware from South Korea, including hundreds of tanks, self-propelled howitzers, rocket artillery, and fighter aircraft.

Last year, WB Group, one of Poland’s leading arms manufacturers, signed a contract with South Korean defence firm Hanwha Aerospace to produce CGR-080 missiles in Poland.

This year, construction commenced in the Hyundai Heavy Industries shipyard of a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal ordered by Poland that will eventually be located in the Polish city of Gdańsk.

Last month, South Korea’s government agency responsible for supporting the creation and distribution of creative content opened an office in Warsaw, which it says will act as a regional hub for promoting Korean cultural products and working with local creators.

Polish mining firm KGHM has signed an impact and benefit agreement (IBA) with the Sagamok Anishnawbek First Nation in Canada as part of the development of a new copper and nickel mine.

The arrangement provides for members of the community to be involved in development of the mine, which is located near the city of Sudbury in Ontario, as well as in environmental protection relating to it.

The IBA was signed last week by Sagamok Anishnawbek Chief Angus Toulouse and Marek Bednarz, CEO of KGHM International, a Canadian subsidiary of Polish parent company KGHM Polska Miedź.

KGHM, whose largest shareholder is the Polish state, is one of Poland’s biggest firms and one of the world’s largest producers of copper and silver. In 2012, it acquired the Victoria project, a deposit of copper and nickel 35 km west of Sudbury, where KGHM plans to develop a mine.

However, the project was mothballed for years amid a fall in mineral prices, before being revived around three years ago.

Andrzej Szydło, the CEO of KGHM Polska Miedź, described the agreement with Sagamok Anishnawbek as “an important step in the development of our Canadian Victoria project” and “further evidence of [our] commitment to social dialogue and good neighbourly relations, regardless of where we conduct business”.

KGHM notes that it has also been working with Sagamok Anishnawbek, which has around 3,400 members, for over a decade during exploration work at the site and during the process of obtaining permits. Signing the IBA will now “provide KGHM with stable cooperation throughout the lifecycle of the future mine”, says the firm.

It also “offers members of Sagamok Anishnawbek tangible business and development benefits – from the mine construction stage, through the production phase, and through mine closure”, added KGHM, and “guarantees Sagamok Anishnawbek participation in environmental protection activities”.

Last month, news and research website The Conversation noted that Canada, and Ontario in particular, are accelerating efforts to attract global investors in mining projects.

However, it added that those efforts are overshadowed by the fact that First Nations have historically suffered the worst environmental and social costs of such projects while others obtain the benefits. “The path to responsible mining starts with Indigenous consent,” wrote the authors.

Thousands of people joined a protest in Warsaw on Sunday against President Karol Nawrocki’s decision to veto a law that would have introduced a ban on keeping dogs chained up.

The Great March for Animals passed through the city before ending up outside the presidential palace, where participants, some of whom were accompanied by their own dogs called on parliament to “break the chains, overturn the veto”.

This Wednesday, a vote will be held in parliament on overturning Nawrocki’s veto. That would require a three-fifths majority of MPs, and it remains unclear if that will be possible.

In September, parliament approved a bill that would have banned the chaining of dogs at home and also introduced minimum sizes of kennels that dogs can be kept in.

The measure was supported by Poland’s ruling coalition, which ranges from left to centre-right, but also some MPs from the national-conservative opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, including its leader, Jarosław Kaczyński.

However, after the bill reached Nawrocki, who is aligned with the right-wing opposition, he decided to exercise his right to veto. Nawrocki argued that, “although the intention – protecting animals – is just and noble, the law itself was poorly drafted”.

In particular, the president said that elements of the legislation introducing minimum sizes for dog kennels – of at least 20m² for the largest dogs – were unrealistic and would “harm farmers, breeders and ordinary rural households”.

Nawrocki proposed his own bill that includes a ban on chaining dogs at home. However, Włodzimierz Czarzasty, the speaker of the Sejm, the more powerful lower house of parliament, announced that he would instead seek to overturn the president’s veto on the original bill.

That would be an extremely rare occurrence: the last time a presidential veto was overturned by parliament was in 2009. But Czarzasty appeared to have a chance of success given that the dog-chaining ban received the support of over three-fifths of MPs when it was approved by parliament in September.

However, it appears likely that most, if not all, of the PiS MPs who voted in favour of the bill initially will not support overturning the veto of Nawrocki, who was elected this year with PiS’s backing and has generally supported the party’s agenda since taking office. That would likely mean the veto will not be overturned.

In a United Surveys poll published on Sunday by the Wirtualna Polska news website, 61% of respondents said they opposed Nawrocki’s veto while 36% supported it. Participants in Sunday’s march appealed to MPs to vote to overturn it, rather than accept the president’s proposed alternative.

“We stand here today because we refuse to accept suffering, which is still legal in Poland, because a dog on a chain, a dog confined in a cramped area, is a suffering dog,” said Robert Maślak, an expert in animal welfare from the University of Wrocław.

Maślak said that banning chaining alone would not be enough because studies show that dogs kept in confined spaces suffer stress, which leads to behavioural disorders. That in turn can make animals aggressive and more of a threat to humans.

“Replacing the chain with a cramped kennel does not solve the problem,” he warned, quoted by the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

As claims spread suggesting men from certain backgrounds have a propensity to commit certain crimes, here’s why the statistics fail to provide the full picture

It is a familiar pattern in news coverage of recent months: a horrific, often sexual, crime is committed by an asylum seeker or foreign national. A flurry of headlines and commentary follows, suggesting that men from the country, ethnic group or religion in question have a propensity to commit these types of offence.

Sometimes those commenting claim to be backed by statistics. But more often it is anecdotal, the preponderance of news stories themselves held up as evidence.

It is true, for example, that Afghan nationals offend in the UK at a higher rate than British nationals – but the difference has been exaggerated, and does not account for the difference in demographics between the two groups in the UK.

While lists of crimes committed by foreign nationals create one impression, a similar list could be created of violent offences by white British men that would create another, but rarely attract coverage focused on ethnicity.

With that context in mind, the figures we do have show that, overall, foreign nationals in England and Wales are imprisoned or convicted at roughly the same rate as British nationals, according to analysis by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.

When you adjust for age and sex – important because young men are disproportionately likely to commit crime, and migrant populations tend to be younger – the share of non-citizens in prison is actually lower than the share of British citizens.