Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.05-042610/https://www.ft.com/content/9f750cdc-b50d-4232-9bd5-21ca7408639c

(…) The Ukrainian officials said that lie detector tests had been administered on staff across several ministries, but declined to give further details or specify how many individuals had been questioned. 

The office of Ukraine’s president declined to comment. The security service said in a statement that it works within the law to protect Ukraine’s security and keeps certain details about its activities confidential.

Polygraph tests are controversial and the science behind them has been questioned, but Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies have frequently used them for purposes including criminal investigations and screening foreignerslooking to join the army.

The investigation follows the publication of details from the draft agreement on March 26 by opposition MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak, who said he had obtained a copy. The Financial Times separately obtained the document and published its contents the following day.

Zelenskyy told the FT at a briefing on March 28 he found it “strange” the US document had leaked. “I wonder who is transmitting this information,” he said. (…)

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April 4 (Reuters) - Armenia's president on Friday signed into law a bill that sets a legal foundation for the South Caucasus country to move towards joining the European Union as it moves to diversify its international ties beyond traditional partner Russia.

(…)

Though Armenia has developed warm relations with the EU, joining will not be easy.

The landlocked, mountainous country of 2.7 million people shares no border with the EU, and its bitter rival Azerbaijan is a major gas supplier to EU countries.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.04-201631/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-caught-between-the-eu-and-uk-northern-ireland-faces-an-extra-layer-of/

Because of its history and border with the EU-member Irish Republic, Northern Ireland has been in an unusual position ever since the U.K. left the European Union in 2020. Brussels and London spent years negotiating a post-Brexit agreement to keep the Irish border open and preserve a 1998 peace accord that ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

A deal, called the Windsor Framework, was finally struck in 2023. Under the agreement, Northern Ireland adheres to most EU regulations for trade with the Irish Republic, but it follows U.K. rules for anything moving back and forth from Britain.

Mr. Trump has complicated matters by imposing different tariffs on products from the EU (20 per cent) and goods from the U.K. (10 per cent).

The EU has vowed to retaliate, but the British government has yet to say whether it will impose counter-tariffs – all of which presents massive headaches for businesses in Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Michelle O’Neill, said Mr. Trump’s announcement “doesn’t serve anybody’s interests and I think it creates a period of uncertainty and instability in terms of the economy here.”

According to the Windsor Framework, all goods entering Northern Ireland from abroad must be charged the EU tariff.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.04-150426/https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/germany-funds-eutelsat-internet-ukraine-musk-tensions-rise-2025-04-04/

PARIS, April 4 (Reuters) - Berlin has been paying for Ukraine's access to a satellite-internet network operated by France's Eutelsat (ETL.PA), opens new tab, as Europe seeks alternatives to Elon Musk’s Starlink.

Eutelsat’s chief executive Eva Berneke told Reuters the company has provided its high-speed satellite internet service to Ukraine for about a year via a German distributor.

Speaking at the company's headquarters in Paris on Thursday, she said it was funded by the German government, but declined to comment on the cost.

Bernese said there were fewer than a thousand terminals connecting users in Ukraine to Eutelsat’s network, which is a small fraction of the roughly 50,000 Starlink terminals Ukraine says it has, but she said she expected the figure would rise.

"Now we're looking to get between 5,000 and 10,000 there relatively fast," she said, adding it could be "within weeks".

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.05-054154/https://www.lemonde.fr/en/intimacy/article/2025/04/05/in-spain-teenagers-are-as-free-as-the-air_6739858_310.html

'Parenting elsewhere.' Twice a month, one of our journalists overseas explores parenting beyond our borders. Spanish parents have no problem letting their offspring stay out until the late hours of the evening. Is this hands-off parenting or based on trust?

via https://mastodon.online/@danielgibert/114275398786738404

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.04-171532/https://www.ft.com/content/ca3c53ab-c6ad-4c83-8425-69e9a937b34a

At a meeting of ambassadors on Thursday, France, Germany, Spain and Belgium said the EU should be prepared to use its “trade bazooka”, the anti-coercion instrument, for the first time ever to achieve this, said two EU diplomats. 

But a move using the instrument could be blocked by a weighted minority of member states. Given Italy’s size, it would be the decisive member of the No camp, which also includes Romania, Greece and Hungary, the diplomats said.

PRAGUE - The head of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said on April 3 that the US government had switched off a satellite that transmitted its Russian-language programme into Russia.

Prague-based RFE/RL, founded during the Cold War to counter Soviet propaganda and funded by the US, has been at odds with the new administration of US President Donald Trump, which decided in mid-March to freeze its funding, amid a drive to slash the size of the federal government.

RFE/RL challenged the decision in court and won a temporary restraining order, but the US Agency for Global Media, the US government agency that oversees its operations, has not yet released the funding.

“We came into work today and saw that satellite services that reach into Russia had been turned off by USAGM,” RFE/RL chief executive officer Stephen Capus told AFP.

The new regulation will lower effective contributions for business owners who pay taxes under so-called “general rules” (zasady ogólne), a flat 19% rate, or a lump-sum tax on recorded revenue, provided that their income remains below a specified threshold.

Those who are taxed under general rules or the flat 19% rate will pay a contribution calculated at 9% of 75% of the minimum wage up to 1.5 times the average wage, which in September was 8,613.14 zloty (€2,025.08) per month. Higher earners will pay an additional 4.9% on income exceeding that threshold.

Business owners who pay a lump-sum tax on recorded revenue will pay a 3.5% surcharge on earnings above a threshold of three times the average wage. The changes will not affect salaried employees, who will continue to pay a health contribution of 9% on their income.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.03-065959/https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/brewing-transatlantic-tech-war%23

There is an even greater threat to U.S. tech companies that has gotten far less attention. In sharp contrast to today’s United States, the European Union has a strong commitment to the rule of law, obliging politicians to comply with judge’s rulings. The Trump administration’s scofflaw tendencies and tech companies’ increasing hostility toward European values may lead to the collapse of the EU-U.S. arrangements on which tech companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft depend.

Schmidt worried a decade ago that an EU-U.S. data dispute might collapse the Internet. Snowden showed how U.S. intelligence agencies had illicitly accessed European social media and Internet search data, breaching European privacy rules. That dispute was patched over by an ungainly agreement, negotiated between the European Commission and the U.S. government. The EU agreed to allow data flows, as long as the United States committed to protecting the privacy rights of EU citizens and offered some means of redress if they were violated by U.S. surveillance agencies. The keystone of the arrangement was a 2016 U.S. commitment that Washington’s surveillance agencies would respect European privacy rights through a process overseen by an obscure U.S. body, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

This arrangement made nobody happy but provided legal and political cover for flows of data across the Atlantic. Meta continued to operate Facebook in Europe, and companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were able to host Europeans’ personal data on their cloud-computing platforms. For those companies, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Google alone makes over $100 billion in sales in Europe.

Swimming pools, playgrounds and amusement parks: Finland's underground facilities, which can double as bomb shelters, have emerged as an inspiring approach as Europe ramps up preparedness after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 

Finland shares a 1,340-kilometre (830-mile) border with Russia. Its network of civil defence shelters is an integral part of its preparedness strategy, which harks back to just before World War II.

Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/sFbGB

A flood of discounted Chinese imports is set to compound the economic dangers to Europe from Donald Trump’s tariffs, analysts warn, prompting Brussels to prepare measures to protect itself from a wave of cheap goods from Asia.

The direct impact of the US president’s 20 per cent levy on EU products has sparked fears about the outlook for the bloc’s embattled manufacturers, who are already reeling from US levies on cars and steel. But the severity of Trump’s tariffs on economies such as China and Vietnam means Brussels is now on alert for an influx of Asian products like electrical goods and machine appliances being diverted into its own markets. The Commission is preparing fresh emergency tariffs to respond, officials said, adding that they have stepped up surveillance of import flows.

“The immediate trade shock to Asia will probably reverberate back to Europe,” said Deutsche Bank’s chief Germany economist Robin Winkler. Chinese manufacturers will try to sell more of their products in Europe and elsewhere as they face “a formidable tariff wall in the US”.

Revelations about a Russian scheme to issue fake ship insurance papers are reverberating across the globe as flag states withdraw approval for Norwegian shell company. Meanwhile, the company seemingly continues to issue new and invalid insurance policies to Russia’s shadow fleet.

In a city like Madrid, men live, on average, three years longer in the Chamartín neighborhood, with greater purchasing power, than in Puente de Vallecas, a working-class area. The trend is similar worldwide, because economic capacity correlates with health and life expectancy. However, according to a recent publication in The New England Journal of Medicine, this dynamic changes when comparing the rich and poor in the U.S. and Europe.

The study, led by Irene Papanicolas, a professor of health services at the Brown School of Public Health, sampled 73,000 Americans and Europeans aged between 50 and 85. They were followed since 2010 to observe the effect of wealth on an individual’s likelihood of dying. First, it was found that, in both the U.S. and Europe, the rich lived longer than the poor, although the gap was much greater in the United States.

This finding was consistent with previous studies showing that the wealthy live longer, but when the comparison was made across continents, the result was even more surprising. Mortality rates across all wealth levels in the U.S. were higher than in the European regions included in the study. The wealthiest Americans had a lower life expectancy than the wealthiest Europeans, and did not exceed that of the poorest in some European countries such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

One country that did not feature on Donald Trump's list of tariffs on US trade partners was Russia.

US outlet Axios quoted White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt as saying this was because existing US sanctions on Russia "preclude any meaningful trade" and noting that Cuba, Belarus and North Korea were also not included.

However, nations with even less trade with the US - such as Syria, which exported $11m of products last year according to UN data quoted by Trading Economics - were on the list.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.03-114113/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-03/tiktok-faces-fine-over-500-million-for-eu-data-sent-to-china

TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd. is set to be hit by a privacy fine of more than €500 million ($553 million) for illegally shipping European users’ data to China, adding to the growing global backlash over the video-sharing app. 

Ireland’s data protection commission, the company’s main regulator in Europe, will issue the penalty against TikTok before the end of the month, according to people familiar with the matter. 

The move comes after a lengthy investigation found the Chinese business fell foul of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation in sending the information to China to be accessed by engineers, added the people, who spoke under condition of anonymity. 

The penalty is likely to be the third highest ever dished out by the Irish watchdog following earlier fines of €746 million against Amazon.com Inc. and €1.2 billion against Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc., the people added. The exact size of TikTok’s fine and the timing of the decision isn’t final and could still change, they said.

TikTok couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. The Irish data protection commission declined to comment. Under the GDPR, national agencies where foreign firms have their EU bases take the lead in policing the rules. The decision can be appealed by TikTok to the Irish courts.

The Slovak cabinet has approved a plan to shoot around a quarter of the country's brown bears, after a man was mauled to death while walking in a forest in Central Slovakia.

Prime Minister Robert Fico's populist-nationalist government announced after a cabinet meeting that 350 out of an estimated population of 1,300 brown bears would be culled, citing the danger to humans after a spate of attacks.

"We can't live in a country where people are afraid to go into the woods," the prime minister told reporters afterwards.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.03-110721/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-03/germany-and-france-push-for-a-more-aggressive-tariff-response

The latest US measures come after Trump announced a 25% import tariff on steel and aluminum as well as on cars and some auto parts. The EU announced a set of countermeasures of up to €26 billion ($28.1 billion) in response to the metals duties, which are expected to enter into force in mid-April. Trump has said he’ll announce other sectoral duties on products including lumber, pharmaceutical goods and semiconductors.

“The EU is the largest single market in the world,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in Berlin Thursday. “We therefore have every opportunity to react in a united and decisive manner and to show that we have our own instruments for action — and they will be used.”

Bloomberg reported earlier that France and other countries have called on the commission to consider deploying the bloc’s anti-coercion instrument — the EU’s most powerful trade tool, designed to strike back against nations that use trade and economic measures coercively. 

The so-called ACI has never been deployed before and could lead to restrictions on trade and services as well as certain intellectual property rights, foreign direct investment and access to public procurement.

Concern is mounting in the EU since US counterparts haven’t shown interest in a negotiated solution, according to another official. The anti-coercion instrument is on the table of options, but is considered a tool of last resort, given the likely outsize impact it would cause.

The statement came as Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is visiting the country, despite an international arrest warrant against him over the war in Gaza. 

Hungary said, on Thursday, April 4, that it would begin the procedure of withdrawing from the International Criminal Court (ICC), just before Prime Minister Viktor Orban was to receive his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, the subject of an ICC arrest warrant. "Hungary will withdraw from the International Criminal Court," Gergely Gulyas, Prime Minister Viktor Orban's chief of staff, wrote in a brief statement. "The government will initiate the withdrawal procedure on Thursday, in accordance with the constitutional and international legal framework." The ICC is the world's only permanent global tribunal for war crimes and genocide.

October 17, 2024. An angry businesswoman sends an email to Spanish Customs. Her name is Vilma Janet Águila, and she is the owner of Abadix Fruits, a company based in Alicante supposedly specializing in importing fruit from South America. “How can it be that on average containers spend 2-4 weeks at the port after arrival. We’re talking about perishable fruit (NOT NAILS OR SCREWS). When the fruit gets to our clients, over ripe, they don’t pay us what was agreed upon, because the quality doesn’t correspond to what was negotiated,” she writes in the email, in which she goes out of her way to appear indignant and announces that she is giving up on collecting the cargo of container TCLU1210545, which had arrived in Algeciras a few days earlier: “WE CAN’T TAKE THIS SITUATION ANYMORE!” she complains in capital letters in the text, co-signed by her partner, José Miguel Berenguer.

The German chemicals industry on Wednesday, April 2, called for the EU to "keep a cool head" in response to US President Donald Trump's new tariffs, warning that "a spiral of escalation would only increase the damage."

"We regret the decision of the US government," the Association of the German Chemical Industry (VCI) said in a statement, calling on Brussels to maintain a "close dialogue" with America, the largest export market for the German chemical industry.

The VCI, which represents industry giants such as Bayer and BASF, said the EU must "remain flexible in its response" to the tariffs. "Our country must not become a pawn in an escalating trade war," the association said, adding that "the goal must be a mutually fair solution – for Europe and the US. The United States is and remains a central trading partner for Germany."

The United States is by far the most important export market for German chemical products outside the EU and absorbs almost a quarter of the country's pharmaceutical exports. The chemicals industry is the third-largest industrial sector in Germany. Along with the automotive industry, it is especially vulnerable to the effects of new US tariffs. Both those sectors have already struggled in recent years with increased competition from China as well as a hike in production costs.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.02-053327/https://www.reuters.com/world/us-officials-object-european-push-buy-weapons-locally-2025-04-02/

The Trump administration - like previous administrations - has pushed for European purchasesof U.S. weapons before, including at this year's Munich Security Conference. Some of the sources consider the recent messages from Washington as a continuation of U.S. policy.

Still, several sources said the U.S. emphasis on the matter has intensified in recent weeks as the EU has moved more decisively to decouple its weapons procurement.

"They are upset about ReArm proposal and that the U.S. is excluded," said one senior European source.