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.

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 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.

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).

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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.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.01-032202/https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/le-pen-verdict-fuels-claims-that-europes-elites-are-colluding-against-populists-c08493e2

The case of Le Pen still raises thorny questions for democracies: Should the rule of law apply always, or only most of the time? And when it comes to politicians, how can we trust the law is being applied without political considerations? 

For many, the debate boils down to whether one trusts the democratic institutions such as courts and regulators taking those decisions. In many cases, they are trustworthy; in other cases, they might be less reliable. 

The disqualification of Le Pen risks deepening the polarization of France’s electorate, divided between urbanites who are broadly supportive of institutions such the judiciary and rural, working-class voters who see Le Pen as a change agent.

Those voters mistrust institutions. That narrative gathered steam after last summer’s snap parliamentary elections, when disparate parties—ranging from President Emmanuel Macron’s pro-business ranks to the far-left France Unbowed—cooperated to keep Le Pen’s candidates from winning seats by withdrawing underperforming candidates from individual races so that voters could coalesce behind a single candidate opposed to Le Pen.