The Irish government is facing a backlash after reports broke of a proposal to kill off as many as 200,000 cows over the next three years in an effort to meet the country’s emissions reduction goals.

In order to stop so-called global warming and climate change, the Irish government has proposed culling 200,000 dairy cows to meet the country’s climate targets.

The presidents of Kosovo and Serbia held talks on Thursday on resolving a political crisis that has spiralled into violence, with the leaders of France and Germany pressing them to take swift steps to reduce tensions.

Kosovo's Vjosa Osmani and Serbia's Aleksandar Vucic met briefly in the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the European Union's foreign policy chief on the sidelines of a summit in Moldova.

France and Germany urged the leaders of Kosovo and Serbia to organise new elections as soon as possible in regions affected by recent civil unrest, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday after talks in Moldova with the two parties.

Speaking after a summit of European leaders in Moldova, Macron said he and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had given them a week to respond to their proposals.

The United States will soon open a small diplomatic mission in Norway that will be its northernmost in the world and only such facility above the Arctic Circle, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Thursday.

The move, which Blinken announced at a news conference in Oslo after attending a NATO foreign ministers meeting, comes as competition over the high north’s resources with Russia intensifies.

Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s decision to send the police to quell the ethnic Serb demonstrations in three municipalities in the north of Kosovo—Zvecan, Leposavic, and Zubin Potok—was ill-advised at best for several reasons.

First, although the municipalities are a part of Kosovo and the mayors have the technical right to enter municipal buildings, doing so at this juncture when tensions with the north are so high is a provocative step that was neither necessary nor wise.