Europe

Europe's most famous technology law, the GDPR, is next on the hit list as the European Union pushes ahead with its regulatory killing spree to slash laws it reckons are weighing down its businesses.

The European Commission plans to present a proposal to cut back the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR for short, in the next couple of weeks. Slashing regulation is a key focus for Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, as part of an attempt to make businesses in Europe more competitive with rivals in the United States, China and elsewhere.

FRANCE 24's Sharon Gaffney speaks to Scott Lucas, professor of US and International Politics at the Clinton Institute at University College Dublin, about the tariffs unveiled by Donald Trump. He says that Trump's announcement on tariffs was filled with lies and distortions and it was the 'dumbest and most economically illiterate speech I have ever heard'. #Trump #trade #tariffs

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U.S. President Donald Trump will buckle under pressure from Germany and Europe in an escalating trade war, German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said on Thursday.

"That is what I see, that Donald Trump buckles under pressure, corrects his announcements under pressure, but the logical consequence is that he must also feel the pressure, and this pressure must now be exerted from Germany, from Europe," Habeck said in a news conference.

Mercedes Benz Group AG is considering shifting the production of another vehicle model to the US in response to Donald Trump’s 25% auto tariffs.

The move may be necessary to deal with the cost of the duties, Mercedes’ production chief Jörg Burzer said Thursday, declining to comment on which model may be moved to its factory in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

This new resource was developed under the FOSSEPS (Free and Open Source Software for European Public Services) Preparatory Action. Its primary objective is to strengthen collaboration across the European Union by providing a central platform for enhancing visibility, sharing, and reuse of open source software solutions beneficial to public sector administrations in EU Member States.

It can be found here: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/eu-oss-catalogue/solutions

Germany’s centre-Right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and the centre-Left Social Democrats (SPD), which are holding coalition talks, have proposed a law that will block people with multiple extremism convictions from standing in elections.

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Britain has nine nuclear reactors with a combined capacity of about six gigawatts, according to the World Nuclear Association. That compares to 57 reactors in France with a capacity of 63 gigawatts.

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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/60254654

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Mr. Orban invited Mr. Netanyahu to visit shortly after the court issued its arrest warrant, assuring him that “the judgment of the I.C.C. will have no effect in Hungary and that we will not follow its terms.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27729062

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary said Thursday it will begin the procedure of withdrawing from the world’s only permanent global tribunal for war crimes and genocide.

“Hungary will withdraw from the International Criminal Court,” Gergely Gulyás, who is Prime Minister Viktor Orbán chief of staff wrote in a brief statement. “The government will initiate the withdrawal procedure on Thursday, in accordance with the constitutional and international legal framework.”

The announcement came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, despite an international arrest warrant against him over his conduct of the war in the Gaza Strip.

The European Commission has announced EU countries may re-open the hunting season for the European Turtle-dove (Streptopelia turtur) in parts of Western Europe if they choose to do so. The reopening follows a three-year hunting pause despite the species’ ongoing decline and weak enforcement of hunting law

Hunting of iconic species paused since autumn 2021 will continue pushing species to brink

The European Union's first-ever summit with the five resource-rich states of Central Asia, will focus on critical minerals needed for a growing defense industry and the bloc's green transformation.

The EU is taking a keen interest in Central Asia that comprises Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, as realization seeped in that Europe was far too dependent on China for critical minerals.

As EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa meet Central Asian leaders in the Uzbek city of Samarkand, sustainable development and Russia's attempts to evade sanctions, among other issues, will be on the table.

But most attention will be paid to infrastructure development required to tap into the region's valuable resources.

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The European Institute for Asian Studies (EIAS) noted that the potential for production expansion is significant. "Kazakhstan currently produces 19 of the EU's 34 critical raw materials and is poised to expand to 21. Uzbekistan ranks as the world's fifth-largest uranium supplier and is also rich in silver, titanium, molybdenum, and gold," it found

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Experts say the EU's efforts are aimed at infrastructure development to help Central Asia extract these minerals in a sustainable way and, in turn, help the EU diversify its supplies.

"The EU offers something different than China and the US, and that's joint ventures with Central Asian companies," Vesterbye said, "That means more investments, industrialization, and growth for local businesses. That's music to the ears of Central Asian leaders."

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The region is a big part of the EU's €300-billion ($324-billion) Global Gateway Project that is billed as a rival to China's Belt and Road Initiative and focuses on developing the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR). This corridor will improve connectivity between the EU and Central Asia and cut travel time to 15 days.

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So much for secure and traceable communication in the White House.

Archived

The pursuit of net zero has relied on Uighur Muslims forced to work in appalling conditions. Experts say Britain should follow other countries and take tougher stance.

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Many of the Chinese workers who are helping us to go green do not want to be at those factories. They do not arrive at work to manually crush silicon and load it into blazing furnaces because of a love of renewables, much less to earn a decent wage.

They are there as part of a mass forced labour programme by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that critics describe as a genocide. A reliance on men and women from the Uighur Muslim minority living in detention centres has helped the Xinjiang region to become the epicentre of the solar industry over the last 15 years.

At its peak, analysts believe that 95 per cent of the world’s solar modules were potentially tainted by forced labour in the region [of Xinjiang, in northwestern China]. This reliance on products partly made through working conditions that would be unfathomable in modern Britain represents what the Conservative MP Alicia Kearns calls an ethical “blind spot”.

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It is not only solar panels that are linked to widespread human rights abuses in the so-called Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region. Fuelled by an abundance of cheap, coal-driven electricity, the region produces vast amounts of everything from cotton to the lithium batteries that are ever more essential to our tech-driven lives.

But as governments across the world invest in solar energy in the race to reach net zero, experts have described a critical opportunity to curtail what has been one of Xinjiang’s champion industries.

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Alan Crawford, a chemical engineer who authored a 2023 report that exposed several companies with ties to forced labour, said that transparency from Chinese producers had decreased as a result. “Transparency has gotten worse because the Chinese know that people like us are looking,” he said.

While the Chinese authorities maintain that the Uighur community is free, images of internment camps have shown razor-wire fences manned by police. Leaked police files revealed a shoot-to-kill policy for escapers.

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The pervasiveness of forced labour across the early stages of the production process makes it difficult to find polysilicon from Xinjiang that has not been contaminated by forced labour. Hoshine Silicon, the dominant MGS producer in Xinjiang and a major supplier to the region’s polysilicon producers, has engaged in “surplus labour” programmes at its factories.

One propaganda account from 2018 details how a married couple were engaged in a “poverty alleviation” scheme in which they were moved 30 miles from their home in the rural Dikan township to work at a Hoshine factory in Shanshan county, leaving behind their children. The couple were described as being “relieved” of their worries by transferring their seven-acre grape farm to the state.

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[Laura] Murphy, a senior associate at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said legislation introduced in the US in 2021 showed how supply chains can be cleaned up. The Uighur Forced Labour Prevention Act, which bans the import of goods linked to the region, has led to thousands of solar panel shipments being stopped by US customs.

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It is for this reason that Murphy believes the UK should mirror the US approach, a strategy already being pursued by the European Union. If the UK’s controls against forced labour are not robust, there is a high probability that the UK will simply become a “dumping ground” for the tainted goods not wanted by the US.

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Andrew Yeh, executive director of the China Strategic Risks Institute, said relying too heavily on China for solar energy products could also leave Britain vulnerable in a geopolitical crisis.

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For Murphy, legislation is the only meaningful response to the issue. [...] She said: “Whatever it is that other countries think they might be doing to discourage it, shy of legislation, shy of enforcement, it is not working.

“We can be morally outraged all we want and we can express our desires not to have forced labour-made goods, even at governmental level. But until we actually put it in law and enforce it, companies will continue to import goods made with forced labour into the UK.”

In an international operation spanning 38 countries, German investigators said on Wednesday that they had dismantled "KidFlix", a major online platform for the distribution of child sex abuse images with 1.8 million users worldwide.

CHISINAU, April 2 (Reuters) - Moldova's prime minister said on Wednesday that Russian agents spent around 200 million euros ($217 million)- nearly 1% of the small pro-European country's GDP - on efforts to buy votes at its presidential election and EU referendum last year. The comments came on the same day Britain sanctioned Evrazia, a pro-Russian non-governmental organisation, saying it was responsible for attempting to rig the referendum in Moldova and destabilise its democracy.

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The pass means 7 travel days, within a window of 30 days.

Paywall? https://archive.is/Gd4OE

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Bénédicte de Perthuis, the judge who sentenced Le Pen for embezzling EU funds and barred her from running in France's 2027 presidential election, was placed under police protection on Monday night over alleged death threats she received, domestic press reported.

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The former Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven announces in a post on Facebook that he will leave the social media platform.

"I can no longer be involved in or support media platforms that contribute to undermining democracy", Löfven writes in the post.

He does, however, mean that "good forces" remain on the platform and takes the opportunity to thank his friends.

"Aware that many good forces are present here, I would like to say: thank you all friends, we'll meet in other contexts", writes the former Prime Minister.

Stefan Löfven concludes the post with an appeal.

"As long as you're here – do your best to stand up for what's good!"

Wind farms off the northern German coast have been asked to install radar facilities in an attempt to boost surveillance of ships and drones, the federal maritime authority said on Wednesday.