Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.06-100541/https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/the-embezzlement-scheme-that-led-to-le-pens-elections-ban-a857027a

PARIS—Marine Le Pen convened a meeting of her party’s European Parliament lawmakers in June 2014 to discuss a vital matter: how to spend the 6.5 million euros the European Union had earmarked for them to hire assistants.

The sum was significant, more than double the entire payroll of Le Pen’s far-right party, then known as the National Front. Le Pen, according to court documents, asked the lawmakers to sign off on a system that allowed the Le Pen family to hand out contracts and cut paychecks to members of her inner circle and other party officials.

“What Marine is asking us is equivalent to signing for fictitious jobs,” one of the lawmakers, Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, wrote in an email at the time to the party’s then-treasurer, Wallerand de Saint-Just. “And it is the lawmaker who is criminally responsible for his or her own money, even if the party is the beneficiary of it.”

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.06-041655/https://www.ft.com/content/40f6e292-839c-4d1f-994e-59bed627b909

(…) That system is on the cusp of huge change, for both political and technological reasons. The weaponisation of the dollar-based financial system — note how the US has cut off access by adversaries to Swift messaging for bank transfers — has prompted quests for alternatives. Ideas include a currency and payments system run by and for Brics countries. Technologies such as stablecoins offer an instant, cheap and 24/7 alternative to the expensive, slow and cumbersome legacy of correspondent banking.

So the fight for domination of the future payments system is on — and the US wants to win. The broader European public may be blissfully unaware. But those in charge of the Eurozone are also determined that this battle for technological control over the economy is one that the EU must not lose. This is the fundamental motivation for the digital euro — a central bank-issued official digital currency that, if done well and fast enough, will rival or outperform the attractiveness of dollar stablecoins.

Without it, Europe faces dangers we have known about for some time — since Facebook’s ill-fated 2019 proposal for its “Libra” electronic currency. Even before that, Europe discovered that when Trump placed sanctions on Iran, Europe could not act autonomously because it was so hard to process trade payments without US-exposed banks.

The fact is that the Eurozone is already shockingly dependent on American payment mechanisms. Some two-thirds of card payments in the Eurozone are processed by non-European card providers, says the ECB; 13 of the 20 countries using the euro do not have national card-payment systems. In those cases, “when you go to buy milk, it’s either [physical] cash or Visa/Mastercard”, as one European central banker puts it. This dependence is replicated in the rapid spread of mobile apps. (…)

During the last UEFA European Football Championship, it wasn’t just the trains that were always running late or the fact that many stores only accepted cash that made Germany look bad. Criticism of the country’s terrible wi-fi connections was also shared with the rest of the world. Germans seem resigned to their spotty coverage, and the country has been trying to deal with the issue for years. At this point, some residents take the problem in stride. “Of course, it’s normal that there’s no signal here, there are a lot of us in the same place,” said a German journalist after leaving a screening at the Berlin Film Festival, upon hearing the complaints of her foreign peers about the lack of reception. Some of the writers from other countries jokingly pointed out that they had better wi-fi in any remote town on the island of Mallorca than they did right there. in the center of Berlin.

Germany has a serious mobile and internet coverage problem, not just in isolated areas, but also in big cities like Berlin and Munich. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has spoken about the issue, and what it means for businesses, on various occasions, and has mentioned Spain as an example of a country that has done well in the area of digitalization and high-speed internet.

Some Germans did note that the subject of artificial intelligence appeared to be absent from the last German elections. “How are we going to debate about AI if we don’t even have internet in downtown Munich?,” two young people seated in front of their laptops at a café in the capital complained, only half jokingly.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.06-143722/https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/le-pen-evokes-spirit-martin-luther-king-jr-supporters-rally-paris-2025-04-06/

(…) A Paris court convicted Le Pen and two dozen National Rally (RN) party members of embezzling EU funds last week and imposed a sentence that will prevent her from standing in France's 2027 presidential election unless she can get the ruling overturned within 18 months.

"We will follow Martin Luther King as an example," Le Pen said in a video appearance for Italian Matteo Salvini's anti-immigration Lega party, which was holding a meeting in Florence.

"Our fight will be a peaceful fight, a democratic fight. We will follow Martin Luther King, who defended civil rights, as an example."

Le Pen supporters waved French flags and chanted "we will win" as they gathered in central Paris on Sunday afternoon for a peaceful protest, which could give an indication of how much popular backing there is for her accusations that prosecutors in the case sought her "political death".

(…)

An opinion poll by Elabe on Saturday showed Le Pen was still favourite to win the first round of the presidential vote with between 32% and 36% support, ahead of former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, who was polled at between 20.5% and 24%.

But attacks by Le Pen and her allies over the "tyranny of judges" have not gained traction, even among some of her supporters, particularly after the lead judge in her case was put under police protection following death threats. (…)

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.06-061130/https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-04-06/trump-tariffs-online-safety-for-uk-kids-can-t-be-a-bargaining-chip

Will Keir Starmer’s government sell out the safety of UK teens in a deal to mitigate Donald Trump’s tariff apocalypse?

That’s the question parents’ groups are asking as the UK, along with every other country, searches for ways to persuade Washington to dial down its new aggressive tariff regime and avert a full-scale trade war.

Saddled with “only” the 10% baseline charge, Britain got off lighter than many, including its recent partners in the European Union, which must now cough up 20% levies on exports. But it’s still about to take a catastrophic hit — the UK economy is, of course, exposed to a general global downturn, and will feel the pinch of the additional US tariffs on its car and steel sectors. More concerning, Britain’s finances are in such a dire state that the Office for Budget Responsibility has warned the wafer thin headroom Chancellor Rachel Reeves set aside to avoid breaching her fiscal rules will be blown out of the water by Trump’s tariffs.

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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/2025.04.05-042610/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. (…)

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.05-080053/https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sex-toys-exploding-cosmetics-anatomy-hybrid-war-west-2025-04-05/

WARSAW, April 5 (Reuters) - Fake cosmetics, massage pillows and sex toys. Crude homemade explosives. A Russian known as Warrior. A code word: Mary.

These are among the key elements of a suspected Russian-run sabotage plot that led to three parcels being detonatedat courier depots in Britain, Germany and Poland last summer, a person with knowledge of the Polish investigation told Reuters.

The pillows, packed into the parcels with the cosmetics and sex toys, contained hidden homemade incendiary devices made of a cocktail of chemicals including highly reactive magnesium, according to the person familiar with the case who provided the most granular account yet of the alleged plot.

The chemicals were ignited by pre-timed detonators adapted from cheap Chinese electronic gadgets used to track items like lost keys, with the effect enhanced by the tubes of what looked like cosmetics but in fact contained a gel made of flammable compounds including nitromethane, according to the source.

"The proceedings in this case concern criminal activities inspired by Russia's GRU," this person said, referring to Moscow's foreign military intelligence agency.

Reuters is reporting the details of the investigation for the first time, drawing on the account provided by the source close to the Polish case as well as interviews with more than a dozen European security officials. The findings provide a rare insight into how sabotage campaigns play out on the ground.

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

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/2025.04.04-201631/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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.