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TOURCOING, France (AP) French President Emmanuel Macron is taking aim at migration a core issue in the country's presidential campaign by pushing to strengthen the European Union's external borders against people illegally entering the blocs passport-free area.

Macron is expected to run for a second term in France's April 3 presidential election. Conservative and far-right candidates have made migration a top campaign theme, criticizing what they see as Macron's inaction on stemming migration.

Our passport-free area (in Europe) is being threatened if we dont know how to guard our external borders and monitor who is entering in, Macron told the La Voix du Nord newspaper.

Macron met with the EU's interior ministers in northern France on Wednesday evening, as the country holds the bloc's six-month rotating presidency. He also met earlier in the day with local officials to discuss economic issues in the former mining region.

Macron said migration policies need to be discussed within a specific political body that will be able to anticipate and draw plans up to prevent crisises.

We want to establish a real Schengen Council to supervise the (passport-free) Schengen area, like what we have for the eurozone," Macron said in a speech in the city of Tourcoing on the Belgian border. He proposed that the first meeting of the council be held next month.

The Schengen area comprises 26 countries including non-EU nations Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. During the pandemic, many Schengen nations erected temporary border controls that went contrary to the zone's freedom of movement ideal.

Macron also wants to create a rapid reaction force to help protect EU states' borders in case of a migrant surge and is also pushing for a rethink of the bloc's asylum application process.

The EU's 27 national leaders agree that changes are needed in the bloc's immigration policies but disagree on how to go about it.

The arrival in 2015 of well over 1 million people, many of them refugees fleeing war in Syria, sparked one of the EUs biggest political crises. Greece was overwhelmed by tens of thousands of people landing in its islands from Turkey. But other EU countries refused to share the burden of caring for the refugees.

In December, the EU's executive arm overhauled the rule book governing free movement in Europe amid EU accusations that Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko was exploiting migrants in a hybrid attack on the bloc by offering them passage to the borders of Poland, Latvia and Lithuania.

Macron also said he wants the EU to be more efficient in deporting those refused entry.

The French president is also looking to reduce the number of visas issued to non-EU nations that are reluctant to take back their citizens who have been refused asylum in the EU. He said the issue will be discussed at a summit between the European Union and the African Union later this month. On average, only around 40% of people refused entry to the bloc are ever actually sent home.

At home, Macron has been under harsh criticism from political rivals over migration, especially after 27 migrants died when their smuggling boat sank in the English Channel in November.

Far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour in January visited the northern town of Calais, where migrants gather in makeshift camps as they try to reach Britain. Zemmour said migrants are dying at sea "because were not tough enough with them. If we had told them ... you wont come to France, you will be deported as soon as you arrive, they would not be dead.

A record-high 52,000 people tried to cross the English Channel last year, with more than half making it to Britain, according to the French Interior Ministry.

The other French far-right presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, travelled last month to the border area between France and Spain in the Pyrenees mountains, which is used as a entry route by migrants coming in from Africa. She called for re-establishing national border controls.

Conservative contender Valerie Pcresse recently made a campaign trip to Greece to visit a camp for asylum-seekers who want to enter Europe from Turkey. She also stressed the need for strong European borders.

It is not at all fortress Europe, but it is not a supermarket Europe either.... There are doors and you must go through the door, she said.

Zemmour, Le Pen and Pcresse are considered Macron's main challengers in the presidential election to be held in two rounds, with a first vote on April 10 and a runoff between the top two contenders on April 24.

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AP Writer Lorne Cook contributed from Brussels.

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Follow all AP stories about global migration at https://apnews.com/hub/migration.

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Macron takes aim at migration with eye on French election - Danbury News Times

IAB Europe, an association for online advertising companies, was fined 250,000 and handed an ultimatum by Belgiums data watchdog for developing an ad-targeting tool that violated the regions privacy law.

Harsh sanctions were necessary because the tool could, for a large group of citizens, lead to a loss of control over their personal data, Belgiums data protection agency said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.

In addition to the fine, the ad group was ordered to put in place a series of remedies to comply with European Union rules.

The findings stemmed from proceedings initiated by complainants at the Belgian Data Protection Authority, coordinated by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

This has been a long battle, said Dr Johnny Ryan of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

Todays decision frees hundreds of millions of Europeans from consent spam, and the deeper hazard that their most intimate online activities will be passed around by thousands of companies.

IAB Europes so-called Transparency and Consent Framework enables websites and publishers to obtain the consent of users for the processing of their personal data for targeted advertising goals.

The tool is especially aimed at facilitating real-time bidding, an advertising technology used by publishers. Companies such as Google have come under increased scrutiny in Europe over the allegedly harmful way peoples data is being processed in advertising transactions.

Google is also the focus of an Irish investigation into its data use in advertising transactions and announced changes to real-time bidding to better protect peoples privacy.

IAB Europe said it had grave reservations about the authoritys decision. The group rejected the regulators finding that IAB Europe can be held responsible over this data, saying that this will have major unintended negative consequences going well beyond the digital advertising industry.

It said its considering all options for a legal challenge. The EUs General Data Protection Regulation came into effect in May 2018 and empowered national data watchdogs to levy fines of as much as 4 per cent of a companys annual sales for the most serious violations. Bloomberg

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Online advertising group fined for tool that violated EU privacy law - The Irish Times

When he spoke about Ukraine on Tuesday for the first time in over a month, President Vladimir V. Putins signal that Russia was open to a diplomatic resolution to the crisis seemed to cool temperatures at least for the moment. But it also illustrated the vast gulf between Moscows demands and what Western nations are even willing to discuss.

As NATO continues to ferry military support to Ukraines Eastern European neighbors, and with Russia planning more extensive drills this week on the European Unions doorstep in Belarus, the danger of the moment has not passed. President Biden has also approved the deployment of about 3,000 additional American troops to Eastern Europe, administration officials said on Wednesday.

But so far this week, much of the focus has shifted to diplomacy, beginning with an explosive clash between U.S. and Russian diplomats at the United Nations Security Council. Those diplomatic efforts continued with a flurry of meetings on Tuesday in both Moscow and Kyiv: Mr. Putin talked with Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain visited President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

Its unclear if these individual efforts will advance hopes for peace, or hold them back.

Here are some takeaways:

As Western intelligence agencies watched railway cars filled with Russian tanks and artillery stream to the borders with Ukraine in December, Mr. Putin delivered a warning that painted the United States and NATO as the aggressors.

If our Western counterparts continue a clearly aggressive line, we will undertake proportionate military-technical countermeasures and will respond firmly to unfriendly steps, Mr. Putin said in televised remarks on Dec. 21.

Two days later, Mr. Putin went quiet on the issue in public a studied silence that kept the West guessing at his intentions. Russia issued a list of security demands, including pulling NATO forces out of nations that used to be part of the former Soviet Unions sphere of influence a nonstarter for the West. Still, the Biden administration responded in writing to Russias demands as part of a diplomatic effort to avert war.

So it was notable that when he finally broke his silence on Tuesday, Mr. Putin did not repeat his threatening language, saying that dialogue will be continued. But he made it clear that the chasm between what Russia wants and what the United States and NATO will discuss remains vast.

And he continued to accuse the West of trying to goad Russia into a conflict, saying that the Ukraine crisis was an attempt to contain Russias development and a pretext for imposing economic sanctions.

The U.S. tones down warnings, but will also send more troops to the region.

For weeks, American officials argued that Mr. Putin was on the cusp of ordering an attack on Ukraine, culminating in President Bidens prediction on Jan. 19: My guess is he will move in.

While other U.S. officials did not go quite as far, last week the Pentagon spokesman, John F. Kirby, said that Russia was still adding to its troop buildup and that an incursion into Ukraine could be imminent. Those warnings escalated the next day when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that Moscow had amassed a large enough force to seize all of Ukraine.

But amid the burst of diplomatic meetings and after criticism from President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that the United States talk of war was unhelpful the Biden administration appears to have softened its tone.

Asked on Tuesday whether it still believed an invasion was imminent, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told NPR: I would not say that we are arguing that its imminent, because we are still pursuing a diplomatic solution to give the Russians an off-ramp.

But the United States is also looking to get more troops on the ground in Eastern Europe. On Wednesday, the Pentagon spokesman, John F. Kirby, said 3,000 additional troops would be sent to Poland and Romania.

We are making it clear that we are going to be prepared to defend our NATO allies if it comes to that, he said.

European leaders are pursuing one-on-one contact with Mr. Putin.

While the United States has presented itself as the leader of a unified Western response to Russia, European nations have made their own direct outreach to the Kremlin in an effort to cool temperatures. These overtures, as much as anything America does, could help determine whether the crisis is resolved peacefully.

President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy have spoken by phone with Mr. Putin in recent days, and Mr. Johnson, the British prime minister, was scheduled to do so on Wednesday.

Mr. Macron has urged a more conciliatory approach toward Moscow, arguing that Europe must take more responsibility for its own security because the United States is not as reliable an ally as it once was. Mr. Draghi issued a statement following a call with Mr. Putin on Tuesday, emphasizing the need to rebuild a climate of mutual confidence to resolve the crisis.

European nations have a keen interest in defusing tensions, partly because if a Russian invasion prompts harsh sanctions against Moscow, their economies, far more closely linked to Russias than that of the United States, would suffer.

Ominous warnings. Russia called the strike a destabilizing act that violated the cease-fire agreement, raising fears of a new intervention in Ukraine that could draw the United States and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.

The Kremlins position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATOs eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscows military buildupwas a response to Ukraines deepening partnership with the alliance.

The outreach is also aimed at domestic audiences. Mr. Macron is trying to elevate himself as a statesman in advance of his re-election bid in April. And Mr. Johnson who has taken a tougher line than other European leaders, accusing Mr. Putin on Tuesday of holding a gun to Ukraines head is eager to deflect attention from the scandal over parties held at Downing Street in defiance of Englands Covid lockdowns.

Mr. Putin spoke about Ukraine on Tuesday while standing side-by-side with the leader of Hungary, a European Union member state and NATO ally. It was a pointed bit of diplomatic stagecraft aimed at demonstrating divisions in the West, as well as the fact that Mr. Putin is not isolated.

For the most part, the United States and its European allies have been on the same page, and Mr. Orban is an outlier. But Mr. Putin has sought to show he has other allies. The Kremlin said that President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil was preparing to visit Moscow. And perhaps most important for Mr. Putin, he will travel to China to meet on Friday with President Xi Jinping, hours before the start of the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, which President Biden and others have vowed to boycott.

It will be the 38th time the two have met, according to Chinese officials, and the first time that Mr. Xi will meet in person with another world leader since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. It follows a video summit in December at which Mr. Xi told Mr. Putin that they firmly support each other on issues concerning each others core interests and safeguarding the dignity of each country, according to Chinese state media.

Washington has watched with concern as the two nations have aligned themselves ever more closely, especially economically. Last month, China announced that annual trade with Russia had reached nearly $147 billion, compared with $68 billion in 2015, the year after Russia annexed Crimea and supported separatists in eastern Ukraine.

In Ukraine, where some 14,000 people have been killed in a conflict that has been raging for years in two eastern breakaway provinces, people have reacted to the dire U.S. warnings and Russias menacing buildup with a mix of stoicism, apprehension and resolve.

Watching Mr. Zelensky on Tuesday was a case study in the contradictions and concern gripping Ukraine in the face of threats by its giant neighbor. He opened a new session of Parliament by calling for unity in the country, offering assurances that its economy was stable and praising the enormous show of diplomatic and military support from Ukraines allies. He avoided any direct mention of Russias massing of troops.

But after meeting with the leaders of Poland and Britain the latest in a long line of leaders making the pilgrimage to Kyiv to offer support Mr. Zelensky offered his own grim appraisal of the moment. Just days after chiding the United States for banging the drums of war, he warned that if diplomatic efforts failed, This is not going to be a war of Ukraine and Russia. This is going to be a European war, a full-fledged war.

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Five Takeaways on Ukraine Crisis, After Putin Breaks Silence - The New York Times

MINSK, 1 February (BelTA) Belarus ships up to 450 tonnes of peat briquettes to countries of the European Union every year. Vyacheslav Rakovich, Head of the Biogeochemistry and Agroecology Lab of the Nature Management Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, made the statement at a press conference held on 1 February in anticipation of the World Wetlands Day (2 February), BelTA has learned.

The scientist noted that the development of peatlands makes a substantial contribution to the Belarusian economy. In the last five years peat mining in Belarus varied from 1.7 million to 3.2 million tonnes per annum. Over 5,000 Belarusians work in the peat mining industry. About 1 million residents of Belarus enjoy heat generated thanks to peat. Peat briquettes represent a large share of Belarus' export. Countries of the European Union alone buy 200-450 tonnes of peat briquettes every year.

The Nature Management Institute is busy working out technologies that will allow reducing the volume of peat consumption in addition to raising its profitability. Fertilizers, absorbents, and growth stimulants based on peat are in development.

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Belarus sells up to 450 tonnes of peat briquettes to European Union every year - Belarus News (BelTA)

PARIS In 2019, Emmanuel Macron invited President Vladimir V. Putin to the French summer presidential residence at Brganon, declared the need for the reinvention of an architecture of security between the European Union and Russia, and later pronounced that NATO had undergone a brain death.

The French leader enjoys provocation. He detests intellectual laziness. But even by his standards, the apparent dismissal of the Western alliance and tilt toward Moscow were startling. Poland, among other European states with experience of life in the Soviet imperium, expressed alarm.

Now a crisis provoked by Russian troops amassed on the Ukrainian border has at once galvanized a supposedly moribund NATO against a Russian threat the alliances original mission and, for Mr. Macron, demonstrated the need for his own intense brand of 21st-century Russian engagement.

Dialogue with Russia is not a gamble, it is an approach that responds to a necessity, a senior official in the presidency, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with French government practice, said Friday after Mr. Macron and Mr. Putin spoke by phone for more than an hour.

Later in the day, Mr. Macron spoke to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a move that placed the French leader precisely where he seeks to be ahead of an April presidential election: at the fulcrum of crisis diplomacy on Europes future.

Mr. Macron is walking a fine line. He wants to show that Europe has a core role to play in defusing the crisis, demonstrate his own European leadership to his voters, ensure that Germany and several skeptical European states back his ambitious strategic vision, and avoid giving the United States cause to doubt his commitment to NATO.

He wants to carve out a special role for himself and Europe, in NATO but at its edge, said Nicole Bacharan, a researcher at Sciences Po in Paris. The case for modernizing the European security arrangements in place since 1991 is compelling. But doing it with 130,000 Russian troops at the Ukrainian border is impossible.

Until now, Mr. Macron appears to have held the party line. Cooperation with the United States has been intense, and welcome. The president, one senior diplomat said, was involved in the drafting of the firm American response to Russian demands that the West cut its military presence in Eastern Europe and guarantee that Ukraine never join NATO a response judged inadequate in the Kremlin. Mr. Macron has made clear to Mr. Putin that, as a sovereign state, Ukraine has an inalienable right to make its own choices about its strategic direction.

Still, the itch in Mr. Macron to shape from the crisis some realignment of European security that takes greater account of Russian concerns is palpable.

The French official spoke of the necessity for a new security order in Europe, provoked in part by the decomposition of the old one.

He suggested that various American decisions had caused a strategic disorder, noting that there had been doubt at a certain moment about the quality of Article 5 the pivotal part of the NATO treaty that says an attack on any one member state will be considered an attack against them all.

This was a clear allusion to former President Donald J. Trumps dismissive view of NATO, a stance that the Biden administration has taken pains to rectify. For France, however, and to some degree Germany, the lesson has been that, come what may, Europe must stand on its own two feet because its trans-Atlantic partner could go on walkabout again, perhaps as early as 2024.

Mr. Putin and Mr. Macron have one thing in common: They both believe that the post-Cold War security architecture in Europe needs refashioning.

The Russian leader wants to undo the consequences of the Soviet collapse, which he has called the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century; push NATO back out of formerly Soviet-controlled countries to its posture before enlargement; and enshrine the idea of a Russian sphere of influence that limits the independence of a country like Ukraine.

What Mr. Macron wants is less clear, but it includes the development of a strong European defense capacity and a new stability order that involves Russia. As the French president said of this innovative arrangement in a speech before the European Parliament this month: We need to build it between Europeans, then share it with our allies in the NATO framework. And then, we need to propose it to Russia for negotiation.

The idea of Europe negotiating its strategic posture with Mr. Putin who has threatened a neighboring country, part of whose territory he has already annexed, without any apparent Western provocation makes European nations closer than France to the Russian border uneasy.

When Mr. Macron visited Poland in early 2020 after the scathing comment about NATO and the blandishments to Mr. Putin he was assailed at a dinner for Polish intellectuals and artists.

Dont you know who you are dealing with? demanded Adam Michnik, a prominent writer and historian imprisoned several times by the former Communist regime, according to a person present. Putins a brigand!

Ominous warnings. Russia called the strike a destabilizing act that violated the cease-fire agreement, raising fears of a new intervention in Ukraine that could draw the United States and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.

The Kremlins position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATOs eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscows military buildupwas a response to Ukraines deepening partnership with the alliance.

To which Mr. Macron responded that he knew very well whom he was dealing with, but given the American pivot to Asia it was in Europes interest to develop a dialogue with Russia and avoid a strengthened Russian-Chinese partnership. The Poles were unimpressed.

Mr. Macrons approach to Mr. Putin is consistent with his relations with other strongmen. He has engaged with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia men whose views of human rights and liberal democracy are far removed from his own in the belief that he can bring them around.

Up to now, the results have appeared paltry, as they were when he tried to forge a bond with Mr. Trump that proved short-lived.

The French presidents own views on the critical importance of the rule of law and respect for human rights have been a constant of his politics. His strong condemnation of the treatment of Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned Russian dissident, irked Mr. Putin. He has made it clear that the annexation of Crimea will never be accepted by France. Engagement has not meant abandonment of principle, even if its endpoint is unclear.

Mr. Macron has also maneuvered effectively to use the Normandy Format, a grouping of France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia, to bolster the cease-fire agreement the countries brokered in eastern Ukraine in 2015. This diplomatic format has the added attraction for him of showcasing Europeans trying to solve European problems. The French goal in the crisis is clear: de-escalation, a word often repeated.

If the president can be seen to have played a central role in achieving that, he will bolster his position in the election, where he currently leads in polls. The downside risk of his Russian gambit was put this way by Michel Duclos, a diplomat, in a recent book on France in the world: The more it appears that Mr. Macron gains no substantial results through dialogue, the more that dialogue cuts into his political capital in the United States and in anti-Russian European countries.

Nonetheless, Mr. Macron seems certain to persist. He is convinced that Europe must be remade to take account of a changed world. A degree of mutual fascination appears to bind him and Mr. Putin.

The senior French official observed that the Russian president had told Mr. Macron that he was the only person with whom he could have such profound discussions and that he was committed to the dialogue.

That will be music to the French presidents ears.

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How France's Macron Is Approaching the Ukraine Situation - The New York Times