Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.09-181952/https://www.ft.com/content/bfa01f8a-c1f5-4b90-a73e-8b4c530828c0

(…) Speaking to journalists in the presidential office on Wednesday, Zelenskyy said Ukrainian intelligence had identified 155 Chinese nationals who had signed contracts with Russia’s armed forces to fight in Ukraine. 

The president said he believed “the real number is much higher”.

Beijing’s foreign ministry said earlier on Wednesday that China always asked its nationals to “avoid any form of involvement in armed conflict” and that Ukrainian claims that many of them were fighting alongside Russian forces had “no basis in facts”.

But Zelenskyy insisted the Chinese leadership was aware of Russia’s recruitment of its citizens and had done nothing to stop it. “China’s top leaders are aware,” he said. “They know.”

Leafing through Russian military documents that he said were obtained by Ukrainian intelligence, the president said Chinese recruits were offered large salaries and given migration documents and payment cards. They underwent four days of medical examinations and received up to two months of military training, he added.

The Chinese troops range in age from 19 to 56 years old, according to the documents, which Zelenskyy shared with the Financial Times and other media outlets. The documents list 168 names, including some recruits not yet deployed. (…)

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.09-043933/https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/04/09/tariffs-european-union-finally-deploys-its-first-set-of-countermeasures_6739989_4.html

And so it begins. After revising their schedule twice, the 27 member states are finally expected to approve, on Wednesday, April 9, the first retaliatory measures against the tariff hikes imposed by Donald Trump's US since March 12. They are responding to the 25% surcharges decided by Washington on European steel and aluminum imports, valued at 26 billion euros per year.

The community retaliations target a wide range of American products – poultry, orange juice, rice, tobacco, soybeans, aluminum and steel, luxury yachts, motorcycles, diamonds, makeup products and clothing − but they remain slightly below the new US tariffs.

While the levy rate is also 25%, the base of the affected goods (22 billion euros per year) is, in fact, narrower. As they seek to "minimize the consequences for their economies," as reiterated by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Europeans struggle to agree on a response proportionate to the aggression they are facing. Fearing that the American president might execute his threats to tax European alcohol at "200%," France, Italy, and Ireland have thus ensured that Kentucky bourbon is exempt from Brussels' counter-offensive.

Moreover, while the US struck all at once, the European Union (EU) staggered its response. The first wave of new tariffs will take effect on April 15. A second – the most significant – will occur on May 16. The 27 have indeed been keen to respect the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which provide for consultation periods, while the US has not bothered with such subtleties.

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.

Conservative and centre-left parties in Germany have reached a deal to form a new government after weeks of negotiations, paving the way for new leadership in Europe's biggest economy after months of political drift.

Friedrich Merz, the leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is expected to become Germany's next chancellor under the agreement, replacing the outgoing Olaf Scholz. 

The parties involved in the coalition have said they will hold a press conference on the deal at 3 pm CET. 

Merz's two-party Union bloc emerged as the strongest force from Germany's February federal elections. 

Merz turned to the Social Democrats, Scholz's centre-left party, to put together a coalition with a parliamentary majority.

This is a developing story and our journalists are working on further updates.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.09-043630/https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/04/08/in-salzburg-the-porsche-family-s-private-tunnel-project-faces-unexpected-resistance_6739981_19.html

Is the peaceful and prosperous Salzburg losing its reputation as a haven of tranquility for Austria's upper bourgeoisie? Wolfgang Porsche's project to construct a private tunnel has indeed caused an unusual political stir in Mozart's birthplace, also known for its highly exclusive classical music festival.

At 81, Wolfgang Porsche, who remains the chairman of the supervisory board of Porsche AG, wants to build a tunnel and an underground garage beneath the Kapuzinerberg, one of the lovely green hills overlooking the city center. The goal is to facilitate access to the Paschinger Schlössl, the grand manor he purchased in 2020 for €8.4 million.

Archive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_fire-bellied_toad

The European fire-bellied toad (Bombina bombina) is a species of fire-bellied toad native to eastern parts of mainland Europe, where it can be found near waterbodies such as ponds and marshes.[2][3] It is known for its red colored belly used to ward off predators, an example of aposematism, and its distinctive "whoop" call.[4][5]

It is Wednesday my dudes, dudettes and people of other dudeist identity.

"The Albanian mafia would call me and say: 'We want to send 500kg of drugs.' If you don't accept, they kill you."

César (not his real name) is a member of the Latin Kings, a criminal drug gang in Ecuador. He was recruited by a corrupt counternarcotics police officer to work for the Albanian mafia, one of Europe's most prolific cocaine trafficking networks.

The Albanian mafia has expanded its presence in Ecuador in recent years, drawn by key trafficking routes through the country, and it now controls much of the cocaine flow from South America to Europe.

Despite Ecuador not producing the drug, 70% of the world's cocaine now flows through its ports, Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa says.

It is smuggled into the country from neighbouring Colombia and Peru – the world's two largest producers of cocaine.

Edamaruku, founder of the Rationalist International, became known in his homeland for travelling around villages in an effort to prove that alleged miracles proclaimed by various holy men were actually scams.

In 2012, he was charged with blasphemy following complaints from Catholic organisations after he showed that an alleged miracle of water dripping from a crucifix in a Mumbai church was actually the result of a leak from a nearby sewage pipe.

Edamaruku has since 2020 been subject to an Interpol red notice, which seeks his detention and extradition back to India.

However, that warrant relates not to the blasphemy charge but to separate accusations – made by an Indian government employee, according to the Times of India – that Edamaruku cheated a woman out of money by making false promises that he could provide a Finnish visa.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.08-053057/https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-says-eu-must-buy-350b-of-us-energy-to-get-tariff-relief/

The European Union will have to commit to buying $350 billion of American energy to get a reprieve from Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs, the U.S. president said late Monday, dismissing Brussels' offer of "zero-for-zero" tariffson cars and industrial goods. 

Trump's comments at a White House press conference were in response to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen saying earlier Monday that the EU had offered to drop the bloc's tariffs to zero on cars and industrial goods imported from the U.S. if Trump reciprocated.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.07-165531/https://www.wsj.com/world/russia-strike-ukraine-children-killed-kryviy-rih-e7ad20c3

Russia’s killing of nine children in a missile strike has shaken even Ukrainians who are hardened to such attacks after three years of war and brought into focus the failure of President Trump to fulfill his campaign pledge of a swift end to the war.

Families held funerals on Monday for children who perished in the Russian attack on the central Ukrainian city of Kryviy Rih on Friday, which also killed 11 adults. Mourners brought flowers and soft toys to the playground in the middle of a residential area that was struck by a ballistic missile.

The United Nations said it was the largest verified loss of children’s lives in a single incident since Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

“We are not asking for pity,” Kryviy Rih’s top official, Oleksandr Vilkul, wrote on social media. “We are demanding the world’s outrage.”

A Belgian prince's attempt to claim social security benefits on top of his six-figure royal allowance has been rejected by a court.

Prince Laurent - the younger brother of King Philippe - received €388,000 (£295,850; $376,000) from state funds last year but said that his work entitles him and his family to social security.

He had argued that he was partly self-employed because of the duties he carries out as a royal, as well as running an animal welfare charity for the past decade.

Laurent, 61, said he was acting out of "principle" rather than for money. The court disagreed.

On 28 March, the state-owned energy company Naftogaz reported a further Russian attack on Ukraine’s gas infrastructure. This was reportedly the eighteenth large-scale strike since the outbreak of the full-scale war and the eighth since the beginning of the year. No specific details of the damage were disclosed, apart from confirmation that the targets were facilities related to gas extraction – most likely, as in previous weeks, compressor and gas treatment stations. The damage was so severe that, in mid-February, Ukraine was forced to increase gas imports nearly tenfold to meet immediate demand.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that current gas reserves in underground storage facilities are at their lowest in at least a decade. This constrains daily extraction capacity and necessitates costly fuel imports. According to the head of OGTSU (the transmission system operator), Ukraine intends to purchase at least 4 billion cubic metres of gas between April and October 2025. A significant portion of this will be American LNG, delivered via EU terminals, including the Świnoujście LNG terminal.

The latest attacks indicate that Moscow is using ceasefire talks with the United States solely as a means to its own ends. It continues to systematically destroy Ukraine’s gas infrastructure, which the Kremlin has exempted from the moratorium on targeting energy facilities (see ‘Negotiations in Riyadh: unclear agreements, slim prospects for implementation’). The principal challenge for Kyiv will be preparing for the forthcoming heating season – most notably, securing sufficient imported gas reserves amid strained public finances.

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.

One of Telegram’s most popular anonymous news channels mysteriously disappeared overnight. “VChK-OGPU” (short for “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission Joint State Political Directorate”) had more than 1.1 million subscribers before it was deleted in the early morning hours of April 7. The channel wrote extensively about Russia’s law enforcement and intelligence communities.

It’s unclear why the channel was shut down. Telegram’s press service told the outlet Mediazona that VChK-OGPU “was deleted by its owner, possibly as a result of unauthorized access,” though the channel’s founder told journalists at Dossier Center that Telegram administrators blocked the account he used to create the channel and then deleted the channel itself. The source argued that Telegram has apparently started enforcing government takedown orders, referring to the Russian authorities demanding last December that Telegram delete VChK-OGPU and several other popular channels.

Meanwhile, another source linked to VChK-OGPU told BBC Russia that there was no unauthorized access to the channel, though the SIM card used in the account that registered the channel is now apparently blocked. Another BBC source suggested that the deletion may be related to an attack on a journalist affiliated with the channel, Alexander Shvarev, whom Latvian national police summoned and warned several months ago of a possible attempt on his life by Russian intelligence.

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/2025.04.04-171532/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.

Archive:

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/2025.04.06-100541/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/2025.04.05-054154/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/2025.04.04-150426/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/2025.04.05-080053/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.

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. (…)

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.