Trade blocs

The foreign ministers of eight central European and Balkan EU countries are holding talks in Greece in which prospective bloc members from the Balkans are also represented.

Friday's meetings in a resort south of Athens bring together ministers from the so-called Visegrad Group — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary — and Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia.

At the 21st ministerial meeting of the Council for Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR) of the CARICOM Caribbean Community held in Nassau, Bahamas, Romania's Deputy Prime Minister Ana Birchall delivered the Romanian Government's strong support for the country's bid for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

AP - European Council President Donald Tusk has praised Macedonia's efforts to reconcile with its neighbors as it accelerates its bid to join the European Union, saying such efforts are needed across the Western Balkans and are "important" for Europe.

The meeting took place in Belgrade, on the margins of the ISAC Fund's conference "New Perspectives for the Western Balkans."

Warsaw and Budapest are expected to lose out on massive amounts of cash as Brussels proposes to move tens of billions of euros in EU funding away from central and Eastern Europe to the countries worse hit by the financial crisis, such as Spain and Greece, writes The Daily Express.

The EU and Mexico said on April 21 they had reached an "agreement in principle" to modernize a free-trade deal sealed in 2000 between Brussels and the Latin American country.

The European Commission's 2018 "progress report" for Turkey urged Ankara to align more closely with the EU's declarations and decisions on common foreign and security policy for the next year.

U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States would only join the Trans Pacific Partnership, a multinational trade deal his administration walked away from last year, if it offered "substantially better" terms than those provided under previous negotiations.

Liliana Pavlova said that the main task of this leadership meeting is precisely this - restoring the dialogue and trust between the leaders in Europe - between the EU and Turkey.

Eleven countries including Japan and Canada signed a landmark Asia-Pacific trade agreement without the United States on March 8 in what one minister called a powerful signal against protectionism and trade wars.