Eurotopics.net

In Switzerland, the Responsibile Business Initiative was narrowly defeated on Sunday. While 50.7 percent voted for Swiss companies that violate human rights and environmental standards abroad to be held accountable under civil law in their home country, the majority of Swiss cantons (including almost all the German-speaking ones) rejected the initiative.

Due to the high number of infections in the Romanian district of Constanța, the authorities banned the annual pilgrimage to Saint Andrew's Cave on November 30. However, the Orthodox Archbishop Teodosie of Tomis opposed the ban and on the weekend called on the faithful to come to the pilgrimage site to be healed.

Berlin, Paris and Rome want to keep all ski areas in the EU closed until January 10 in a bid to limit the Covid infection rates. Vienna opposes the idea saying it does not want to further damage the sector, which generates an annual turnover running into the billions, even though it played a key role in the spread of the virus across Europe at the beginning of the pandemic. For some commentators, there is more to the dispute than the fear of Covid.

Four years after the failed coup in Turkey, 337 people have been sentenced in Ankara to life imprisonment for violating the constitution, manslaughter and attempts on the president's life. Some of the arraigned received as many as 79 life sentences. On 15 July 2016, members of the Turkish military staged an abortive attempt to topple the government, which believes a "Fethullahist terror organisation" (Fetö) led by the preacher Fethullah Gülen was behind the coup.