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Britain is backing a French plan to create a European military intervention force as a way to maintain strong defense ties with the EU after Brexit, a minister told AFP on Saturday. The British junior defense minister, Frederick Curzon, said London was “very keen to support” French President Emmanuel Macron’s plan for a force that could be deployed rapidly to deal with crises. The force, known as the European Intervention Initiative, would be separate from other EU defense cooperation, meaning there would be no obstacle to Britain taking part after it leaves the bloc. […] Twenty-five EU countries signed a...

German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen has put in a request for an increase to the military budget of €12 billion ($14.6 billion) over the current term of parliament, an amount greatly in excess of present budget plans, a newspaper reported on Sunday. The Bild am Sonntag said Finance Minister Olaf Scholz had so far foreseen an increase in defense spending of just €5.5 billion over the four years to 2021. The Defense Ministry had already criticized Scholz’s plan on Friday as “inadequate in view of the huge accumulated needs and required modernization, particularly in the medium term.” According...

The European Union and Mexico reached an agreement on Saturday on a new free trade deal, a coup for both parties in the face of increased protectionism from the United States under President Donald Trump. Since its plans for a trade alliance with the United States were frozen after Trump’s election victory, the EU has focused instead on trying to champion open markets and seal accords with other like-minded countries. The agreement in principle with Mexico follows a deal struck last year with Japan and comes ahead of talks next week with the Mercosur bloc of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and...

In Rheinland-Pfalz, Marx’s 200th birthday bash is bringing in a lot of capital. Whether the communist philosopher would have been down with this commerce is hard to say. Karl Marx was born on May 5th, 1818 in Trier, in what is now Rheinland-Palatinate. Many cities in the surrounding area are using the upcoming anniversary to gain big capital from multiple Marx-themed memorabilia, including a “zero-euro” bill introduced in March with the likeness of Karl Marx, who had a very distant relationship to money.The German thinker is known for being the father of modern Communism, with groundbreaking works such as Capital—A...

US President Donald Trump “will not succeed” in dividing European nations against one another over trade, German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier warned on Sunday ahead of a visit to Washington. In the European Union “we are a customs union and act collectively. It cannot be in the interest of the US government to divide Europe, nor will it succeed,” Altmaier told German business daily Handelsblatt. […] “Companies and consumers on both sides would foot the bill if the US and Europe tumble into a trade war,” Altmaier said. Meanwhile, countries like China that stand accused of flooding global markets with...

The EU is set to hit a wide range of American products — ranging from yachts to peanut butter — with duties of 25 percent to retaliate against President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum. The products targeted, as shown in a list obtained by Politico, are chosen so as not to harm EU industries, which do not need these imports. Some targets clearly gun for politically sensitive Republican-run states. […] In agriculture, the EU will go after kidney beans, bourbon whiskey, rice, cranberries, orange juice, peanut butter, tobacco and cheroots. […] In the industrial sector, the...

The German government warned Monday that a transatlantic trade war would harm both Europe and the US, urging Washington not to take a “wrong path” after a weekend of aggressive trade rhetoric. “I don’t want to judge how close to or far from a trade war we are. Such a trade war would not be in German, European or American interests,” Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters in Berlin. However, “closing oneself off and protectionism are the wrong path,” Seibert added, after President Donald Trump at the weekend threatened to impose tariffs on car imports from the European...

Her eurosceptic rhetoric sounds a lot like that of former Ukip leader Nigel Farage, even telling of her admiration for the 53-year-old’s Brexit campaign as she told supporters to “take their country back”. She said: “I look at Nigel Farage’s example. It took 17 years, but Brexit came. “I don’t plan to wait that long.” She claims the EU has turned “Finland into its province” and has railed against the country’s political elite, who she argues do not represent the working class.

The percentage of GDP spent by Norway on defense has decreased, despite NATO obligations for member countries to increase spending in the area to two percent by 2024. The reduction in spending was reported by newspaper VG on Thursday. Defense minister Frank Bakke-Jensen said in a written response to a parliamentary question that government spending on defense would reach 1.56 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) this year. It will then fall further to 1.5 percent in 2020 and remain at that level until 2024, according to the report. […] According to NATO’s own figures, Norway spent 1.59 percent of...

German security authorities are increasingly using mobile phones to secretly locate suspects, according to a media report published on Tuesday. More and more, in order to determine the location of suspects, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) are using mobile phones to send out hidden text messages, according to a report in Handelsblatt. In the second half of 2017 alone, the BfV sent out around 180,000 such messages. In the same period the previous year, the BfV did this about 144,000 times. By using this technique, security authorities can...

It’s better here: That was the message of a panel of experts considering the rise of the extreme right and of anti-Semitism in the United States and Europe. That was the good news at the forum Monday sponsored by Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization. No one, however, could quite pin down why Americans were more resistant to anti-Semitism than Europeans. “It’s far from perfect,” said Ira Forman, until January the international anti-Semitism monitor for the State Department. “We do it now better than we did 50 years ago, there’s no guarantee we will continue to do it, and frankly,...

EU Commission Plans The Final Solution To “Disinformation on the Internet” There are growing concerns in Brussels over the disinformation given citizens over the internet. That is why an “expert group” of researchers, journalists and the representatives of platforms is meeting in Brussels, and will eventually present suggestions to the EU Commission for a final solution to avoid disinformation on the internet. “Since the election of Donald Trump as the president of the USA at the end of 2016, there are increasing worries in Europe that fake news on the internet might drastically manipulate public debate. The EU commission therefore...

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel is considering joining French President Emmanuel Macron at the World Economic Forum in Davos next week in what could turn into an epic clash of competing world views with U.S. President Donald Trump. Merkel, who has been struggling to put together a government since a German election in September, had been expected to skip the annual gathering of leaders, CEOs, bankers and celebrities in the Swiss Alps for a third straight year. But after clinching a preliminary coalition agreement with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) on Friday, German officials said Merkel could travel...

Germany is set to start enforcing a law that demands social media sites move quickly to remove hate speech, fake news and illegal material. Sites that do not remove “obviously illegal” posts could face fines of up to €50 million (£44.3 million; $60 million). The law gives the networks 24 hours to act after they have been told about lawbreaking material. Social networks and media sites with more than two million members will fall under the law’s provisions. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will be the law’s main focus, but it is also likely to be applied to Reddit, Tumblr and...

Last week, the finance ministers of Europe's five biggest economies — Germany, France, the UK, Spain and Italy — wrote an anxious letter to their American colleague, US Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, and copied it to all senior Republican politicians in the Congress and Senate. The letter's thrust: The draft US tax bill, if passed as written a week ago, would represent a break with global fair-taxation rules as applied to corporations, and represent a thinly disguised form of trade war. "The United States is Europe's single most important trade and investment partner," the finance ministers wrote. "It is important...

France’s finance minister unveiled Friday a decree that would make it the first nation in Europe to allow the trading of some non-listed securities using the blockchain technology that underpins cryptocurrencies. The decree, presented by Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire to the government, should enter into force by July at the latest and will apply to non-listed financial securities that EU law doesn’t require to be traded via an intermediary, a market worth potentially more than €3 trillion. In particular, this includes shares in mutual and hedge funds, negotiable debt securities, and unlisted stocks and bonds. Blockchain technology debuted in...

he leader of Germany's main socialist party has called for a United States of Europe by 2025. Martin Schulz said any countries who disagree should follow Britain's example and leave the bloc. He made the plea in a speech to 600 of his Social Democrats at a congress to decide whether to start coalition talks with Angela Merkel's party.

Marine Le Pen's political awakening came at the age of eight, when she survived a bombing at her family's Paris home. Five kilograms of dynamite had been placed on the landing outside the apartment at 9 Villa Poirier. The explosion ripped open the entire front of the building. A baby in the next-door flat fell five floors and was saved by the branches of a tree. In her autobiography, the woman who took over the leadership of France's National Front (FN) from her father describes the chaos, the smoke and debris. She and her two sisters “were on our knees...

The European Union is moving to lift barriers to the rapid deployment of the 28 nations’ armies to confront aggressors within Europe or abroad. Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc, unveiling the plan Friday, said that “we need to be able to react effectively to internal and external crisis situations.” The aim is to upgrade infrastructure like bridges, roads and runways that can’t handle heavy military equipment and cut customs and administrative red tape, which cause delays, higher costs and leave Europe vulnerable to attack. …

Military planners in Berlin played out a scenario in which a growing number of countries follow Britain in leaving the EU, resulting in an "increasingly disorderly" world, Der Spiegel reported.  "The EU enlargement has been largely abandoned, more states have left the bloc," strategists wrote in a study cited by the magazine. "The increasingly disorderly, sometimes chaotic and conflictual world has dramatically changed the security policy environment for Germany and Europe." Der Speigel said the study could inform German armaments programs in the next several years. The scenario was one of six examined in a study of security challenges German...