Europol has shut down one of the largest dark web pedophile networks in the world, prompting dozens of arrests worldwide and threatening that more are to follow.

Launched in 2021, KidFlix allowed users to join for free to preview low-quality videos depicting child sex abuse materials (CSAM). To see higher-resolution videos, users had to earn credits by sending cryptocurrency payments, uploading CSAM, or "verifying video titles and descriptions and assigning categories to videos."

Europol seized the servers and found a total of 91,000 unique videos depicting child abuse, "many of which were previously unknown to law enforcement," the agency said in a press release.

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.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.03-040408/https://www.ft.com/content/ce158965-33b5-4bcc-9582-ade89a5c57db

Nato could play a key role assisting a proposed European military mission to guarantee a peace deal in Ukraine under plans being sketched out by a coalition of Kyiv’s western allies.

Nato’s command and control structures would be used in a deployment of a so-called reassurance force in Ukraine, under one proposal being debated in talks led by France and the UK, five officials briefed on the plans told the Financial Times. Under the proposal, the force would also tap the alliance’s shared intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.

The proposal was one of multiple options under discussion and could be altered before any final agreement, the officials said.

Finland will begin the process of withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines and significantly increase defence spending over the next four years.

Prime Minister Petteri Orpo announced the decision at a government press conference on Tuesday. The move would reverse Finland’s 2012 accession to the international treaty and allow the return of landmines to national defence planning.

A framework agreement signed during King Frederik X's first state visit to France foresees 'the supply of 250 to 1,000 Mistral 3 missiles,' the Elysée said on Tuesday. This comes against a backdrop of America's push for Greenland, a Danish territory.

This rule has frequently been broken in the past, and is still being breached, according to the sources.

Since the boundaries between what constitutes work "necessary and directly linked" to the role of MEP, and what does not, are not crystal clear, “local assistants” often perform duties that are not strictly related to the MEP’s activity in the Parliament. 

“Some MEPs employ local politicians doing political activity in their constituency,” said one source in the Parliament, speaking freely on the basis of anonymity. “Then their calls and meetings are twisted to be reported as related, in one way or another, to the MEP’s parliamentary mandate," this source added.

Sometimes, this practice is revealed and has resulted in several episodes of embezzlement and misuse of funds in the last years.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.02-134322/https://www.ft.com/content/93d7168b-75a3-41e3-ba5a-4f378b93a709

The UK has circulated plans for European countries to establish a “supranational institution” that jointly purchases military equipment, stockpiles weapons and helps to finance large-scale rearmament across the continent. 

The informal paper, written by UK officials and seen by the Financial Times, presents the case for a multilateral fund for a “coalition of the willing” that would borrow on markets at favourable rates and support defence spending. 

Backed with equity and sovereign guarantees, the fund would both lend money for defence projects and actually acquire military assets, creating common “stockpiles” of equipment for participating nations.

Drawn up by UK Treasury officials, the so-called “non-paper” was circulated last week with key European capitals for discussion but stated that it does not represent the official policy of the British government. “We don’t comment on leaks,” said a UK government spokesperson. 

While not specifying the intended size of the fund, the paper says the measures could help to close a defence financing gap in Europe that is estimated to be “hundreds of billions of euros”.

German A., a 43-year-old Russian engineer, is accused of secretly supplying sensitive technical information from ASML, NXP, and TSMC to Russia, allegedly to assist in building a 28nm-capable fab there, reports NRC. His illicit earnings were about €40,000, and he now faces 18 to 32 months in prison. Though German A. alone could not steal full designs for a semiconductor, a coordinated group could potentially assist semiconductor production in Russia.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.03-040358/https://www.ft.com/content/cba18cc8-448b-48cf-a8d6-88600375d0dc

Last November, Poland’s rightwing opposition lawmakers celebrated Donald Trump’s election win as if it was their own. They interrupted a parliamentary session to give Trump a standing ovation and chant his name. Some Polish MPs even sported red “Make America Great Again” caps.  

Like many other nationalist parties in central and eastern Europe, Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS) shares a socially conservative and anti-immigration view of the world with Trump’s Maga movement. 

But five months on, Trump’s rapid rapprochement with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, and apparent disdain for many of America’s Nato allies, are causing consternation across a country where suspicion of Russia runs deep. The issue looms large over Poland’s presidential election, set to take place on May 18. 

“People knew Trump 2.0 could be more difficult than his first term, but I think that Trump’s rhetoric and what’s been happening so far have basically been pointing towards most nightmares coming true,” says Piotr Buras, head of the Warsaw office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Yes, there are politicians here who are playing things down . . . but I think the shock is still very, very deep,” he adds.

The recent publication of the 2024 results of the multinational Merck, which operates as Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD) outside the United States, has revealed an unprecedented figure in the history of the pharmaceutical industry. Sales of the drug Keytruda, a monoclonal antibody indicated for several types of cancer, reached $29.5 billion after growing 18% last year. Never before has a drug reached such levels, shattering the record — once considered unattainable — of $19.95 billion set by Abbvie’s Humira in 2022. To put the figure into context, Keytruda has a turnover as high as the fashion giant Zara or the gross domestic product (GDP) of countries such as Senegal and Iceland.

“It’s a drug that has forced us to rethink how we fund some treatments in the public health system. The system wasn’t prepared for a therapy that could reach this magnitude,” says Sandra Flores, a member of the Spanish Society of Hospital Pharmacy (SEFH) and head of this service at Virgen del Rocío Hospital in Seville. One of the keys to the success of pembrolizumab — the name of the active ingredient in Keytruda — is its ability to act against various tumors. This has led the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to approve 30 indications for 15 types of cancer, 18 of which are currently funded by the public health system.

Outrage is a precious political currency and France's far right has spent this week attempting, furiously and predictably, to capitalise on the perceived injustice of a court's decision to block its totemic leader, Marine Le Pen, from standing in the 2027 presidential election.

(…)

Nervous about the impact the judgement may have for the country's frail coalition government, the Prime Minister François Bayrou has admitted to feeling "troubled" by Le Pen's sentence and worried about a "shock" to public opinion.

But other centrist politicians have taken a firmer line, stressing the need for a clear gap between the justice system and politics.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.02-174336/https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/04/02/how-us-tariffs-are-disrupting-europe-s-aluminum-industry_6739780_19.html

Global trade is like a five-cushion billiard game, with rebounds that are hard to predict. The 25% tariffs imposed by United States President Donald Trump since March 12 on aluminum are a textbook case.

The European Union does not export much aluminum to the US – about 2% to 4% of its annual production. The same is true for France: "Today, we do not export to the US at all, so we will not be directly affected," said Guillaume de Goÿs, president of Europe's largest foundry, Aluminium Dunkerque, to La Voix du Nord local newspaper in February. At first glance, the impact should be limited.

But to believe that would be a grave error, according to Gerhard Anger, head of Alu-met – a company with 150 employees specializing in recycled aluminum with two industrial sites, in Germany and Austria. "It's going to be a disaster for us. Our factories will lose money," he said. Rob van Gils, who leads Hammerer Aluminium Industries, a large company with eight plants in Germany and Central Europe that employs 2,000 people and also specializes in recycled aluminum, agreed: "If the European Union does not react, we will be forced to reduce production."

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.02-040204/https://www.ft.com/content/e0448bb9-8b75-441f-9cfa-28cd0846fe63

Ever since fleeing her Russian-occupied hometown of Melitopol three years ago, Kateryna has longed for a chance to return and see her mother again. 

But watching the Trump administration in America’s negotiations with Russia over how to end the war in Ukraine, the young schoolteacher has found herself rapidly losing hope.

“We can see that the question of the occupied territories is not even on the table,” Kateryna said. “So the outlook by this point is already pretty clear. We’re not going to see our parents any time soon.”

Kateryna is among hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who fled from the country’s south after Russian troops seized large areas in early 2022 and imposed their rule on the population through a campaign of violence and forced assimilation.

She left believing her departure would be temporary. Her parents stayed in Melitopol. “Then two weeks turned into three years,” she said. Now she fears she will never see them again.

The US Army is investigating what happened.

The statement did not specify where the final soldier's body was found. The team had been working near the border with Belarus.

The M88A2 Hercules, one of the largest military vehicles used by the US Armed Forces, is designed to recover damaged tanks and other vehicles from battlefields.

If people insist that most things on the internet must remain ‘free’, the mechanisms that allow that to happen must continue too. 

Invariably that means more advertising alongside diminishing privacy, at least for those lucky enough to still have any left. Yet life could still be a lot worse, oddly enough by restrictions on advertising designed to hurt certain platforms while ensuring people are unable to profit from them.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.01-101737/https://www.ft.com/content/19ee5f60-106c-4dd9-a55d-f7e4d36861b5

Ursula von der Leyen told the European parliament on Tuesday that the bloc was prepared to hit services exports including those from Big Tech companies if US President Donald Trump imposed “reciprocal tariffs” on all imports into the US.

Brussels would negotiate “from a position of strength”, she said. “Europe holds a lot of cards. From trade to technology to the size of our market. But this strength is also built on our readiness to take firm countermeasures. All instruments are on the table,” she said. 

The EU has the ability to hit services exports, where the US has a surplus. That could include suspending some intellectual property rights and excluding companies from public procurement contracts under its Enforcement Regulation.

A further escalation would be to use the “anti-coercion” instrument for the first time. This allows even tougher action on intellectual property and public procurement. The bloc could reduce access by US financial services companies to its market.

Poland has signed an intergovernmental agreement with the United States, worth almost $2 billion (7.7 billion zloty), that will see the US provide logistical support and training for the Patriot air defence systems protecting Polish skies.

“Poland is a model NATO ally and a leader in advanced air and missile defense,” said US chargé d’affaires Daniel Lawton at a signing ceremony in the military base in Sochaczewo, attended by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

“We are proud to celebrate another step in US-Polish defense cooperation – strengthening NATO’s eastern flank and deepening our strategic partnership,” added Lawton.

As Ukrainian cities are bombed almost nightly by Russia, the idea of holding elections here might seem fanciful.

But in the streets and offices of the capital, Kyiv, the prospect of the country going to the polls is once again being discussed.

Election rumours have come and gone in the three long years of Russia's full-scale war.

Each time they have been dismissed by government, opposition and public alike, arguing unity of effort against the Russian invader must come first.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.01-162021/https://www.ft.com/content/bd31d85a-7ccf-4598-9c01-bf0727f1398c

The EU antitrust watchdog has fined 15 large car manufacturers and the European Automobiles Manufacturers’ Association a total of €458mn for their role in a long-lasting cartel involving vehicle recycling.

Mercedes-Benz, which also participated, avoided a fine because it first alerted European regulators to the cartel in 2019.

Other companies involved included Volkswagen, Renault, Stellantis, BMW, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar Land Rover, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Opel and Volvo Cars, alongside the ACEA. All the companies admitted taking part and settled with the European Commission.

The European Commission has charged the largest online platform providers in the EU a total of €58.2 million in supervisory fees last year, it disclosed in a report to the European Parliament and member states published on Monday.

The fees – charged to the largest online platforms with more than 45 million users per month – are meant to cover the Digital Services Act (DSA) enforcement activities of the Commission in 2025, as well as human resources and administration costs, the EU executive said. 

The fee for each individual platform may not be greater than 0.05% of the service provider’s worldwide profit in the preceding financial year.

Three online platforms – Meta, TikTok and Google – have together filed five court cases against the supervisory fees on their platforms, all of which are still pending.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.01-121414/https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/trump-wants-nato-to-spend-more-europe-pitches-redefining-defense-to-get-there-d99fa2a3

People familiar with the discussions say one option under initial consideration is to include national spending to improve a country’s resilience to attacks on vital infrastructure, or hybrid attacks that aim to undermine public opinion and trust in democratic institutions.

Another possibility is letting countries include investments that are vital to military operations, such as transportation infrastructure that militaries rely on. NATO includes some military infrastructure in its spending total, but not civilian infrastructure that might be used by militaries in wartime.

The UK government said Tuesday that anyone working in Britain for the Russian state will have to register on a new list launching in July or face jail.

Security minister Dan Jarvis told parliament that Russia would be subject to the most stringent restrictions of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (Firs).

Archive: none required

Some organisms mutate radically in order to survive. The current National Rally (RN), for example, a political entity founded 56 years ago as the National Front by former members of the SS, a handful of anti-Semitic collaborators and former OAS terrorists — the organization opposed to the French exit from Algeria that tried to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle — is today a mainstream political party. But the road to so-called normalization has been plagued by resignations and in-fighting. After denying its origins, expelling its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and rebranding itself as pro-Israel, the party could now complete its transformation by eliminating the Le Pen name from its ranks.

The far-right party suffered its biggest blow to date on March 31 when its leader, Marine Le Pen, was sentenced to four years in prison — with two of those years suspended and two to be served outside jail with an electronic bracelet — and a five-year ban on running for election. Should the appeals she will file fail or be resolved too late, Le Pen will be out of the 2027 electoral race, just when she was closest to achieving the long-held family dream of moving into the Élysée Palace.

In the event, the figure of Jordan Bardella, 29, her protégé and president of the RN, will be propelled to the fore, a radical change for a party based largely on family ties, whether blood or sentimental. “We are a political party and to nominate a candidate there has to be a congress. But if Marine has chosen him, he can’t be left in the gutter in case he has to run,” Louis Aliot, vice president of the party and ex-partner of Le Pen, told EL PAÍS after being convicted along with Le Pen.