Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.09-095416/https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germanys-far-right-afd-tops-poll-first-time-blow-chancellor-in-waiting-merz-2025-04-09/

BERLIN, April 9 - Germany's far-right AfD party topped a major poll for the first time on Wednesday in a sign of growing dissatisfaction with mainstream parties as chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz seeks to seal a coalition government deal.

Support for Merz's conservative CDU/CSU bloc, which won the February 23 election, fell by five percentage points to 24% while the Alternative for Germany (AfD) gained three points to land on 25%, according to the Ipsos institute's poll.

The AfD came second in the election, the best performance by a far-right party since World War Two.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/2025.04.02-174336/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/2025.04.02-134322/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”.

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 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.

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/2025.04.02-053327/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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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: 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.

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.