IndustryStandard

WASHINGTON/PARIS, April 2 (Reuters) - U.S. officials have told European allies they want them to keep buying American-made arms, amid recent moves by the European Union to limit U.S. manufacturers' participation in weapons tenders, five sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The messages delivered by Washington in recent weeks come as the EU takes steps to boost Europe's weapons industry, while potentially limiting purchases of certain types of U.S. arms.

In a March 25 meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the foreign ministers of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia that the United States wants to continue participating in EU countries' defense procurements, the sources told Reuters.

The verdict is in: the National Rally (NR) and its leader, Marine Le Pen, have been found to have employed fictitious European parliament assistants between 2004 and 2016. The fraudulent scheme enabled the misappropriation of around €2.9m in European funds, and Le Pen has now been barred from holding public office for five years. Could this mark the end for the National Rally? Highly unlikely – and the reason lies in the party’s strategy.

During the trial, Le Pen deliberately maintained silence in response to the allegations – a tactic some outlets dismissed as evidence of a weak defence, even questioning her credibility. Yet this quiet is far from a sign of weakness; it reflects a long-established approach that consistently shuns conventional manoeuvres in favour of an intentionally unpredictable stance.

The origins of this strategy date back to 2011, when she set in motion the “de-demonisation” of the NR. This was not just an exercise in recalibrating the party’s image and rhetoric; it was a move to sever ties with the extremist legacy that had long marred her family’s name. Her rebranding transformed the Front National into the National Rally and charted a new course for the party.

This process also involved a purge of party members who openly endorsed the Vichy regime – a purge so uncompromising that it resulted in the banishment of her own father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. By casting him aside as a cornerstone of her de-demonisation campaign, she demonstrated a readiness to make brutal sacrifices. Now, she may well have to repeat this tactic, sacrificing herself to clear the path for the rise of the NR’s prodigy, Jordan Bardella.

More journalists have been killed in Israel’s genocide in Gaza than in the past seven major U.S.-involved wars combined, marking the “worst ever conflict” for reporters in history, a new report says.

As of late March, at least 232 journalists have been killed in the Gaza genocide, with the vast majority being Palestinians, according to a new paper by the Costs of War project in Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Nearly 380 journalists have been wounded in the violence as of January, per the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.

A Scottish tourist who suffered severe burns in a suspected gas explosion at a building in Rome has died of his injuries.

Grant Paterson, 54, was admitted to hospital on 23 March after the explosion and subsequent collapse of the block of flats where he was staying, in the Monteverde district.

The explosion, which is still under investigation, occurred on the final day of Paterson’s visit to the Italian capital. He was pulled out from beneath the rubble and taken to Rome’s Saint’Eugenio, where he underwent several operations for burns to about 75% of his body.

Doctors said a few days ago that Paterson, from East Kilbride in South Lanarkshire, was not conscious and his breathing was being “mechanically assisted”. His death was announced on Tuesday.

Israel should control the Gaza Strip for the foreseeable future and "cleanse if of enemies," Likud MK Amit Halevi told Radio 103FM on Sunday.

“We want to occupy the territory to cleanse it of the enemy; otherwise, it will kill your children and kidnap your grandchildren again,” he said. “Occupation is the nature of war.” Halevi said Israel is required to make a fundamental change in Gaza, part of which is control.

He said Israel needed “to return to Gaza permanently and control this space, because it is part of our homeland.”

When asked whether the occupation of the Gaza Strip would lead to the citizenship of Palestinians, he replied, “We want to distinguish between the status of the territory and control over it and the status of the residents, which is definitely something that deserves to be defined. When you give control over education, culture, and religion, you get the results you get.”

Donald Trump will announce his latest round of tariffs at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, threatening to unleash a global trade war on what he has dubbed “liberation day”.

Trump has rattled global stock markets, alarmed corporate executives and economists, and triggered heated rows with the US’s largest trading partners by announcing and delaying plans to impose tariffs on foreign imports several times since taking office.

No details of Wednesday’s plans have been made available ahead of the announcement. The president is set to speak at 4pm ET. White House officials said that the implementation of the most sweeping rewrite of US trade policy would be immediate.

Trump has made clear a few goals he wants to accomplish through his tariffs: bring manufacturing back to the US, respond to unfair trade policies from other countries, increase tax revenue and incentivize crackdowns on migration and drug trafficking.

All bakeries in Gaza have been forced to close down due to Israel’s blockade on food and essentials.

“Bakeries will no longer operate until the [Israeli] occupation opens the crossings and allows the necessary supplies to enter.”

The WFP supports the running of 18 bakeries in the enclave. Their closures will worsen a starvation and malnutrition crisis that has devastated Gaza’s two million residents.

A Cyprus court’s acquittal of five men accused of abducting and raping a British woman in the resort of Ayia Napa has been met with outrage as calls mount for the verdict to be challenged.

Dismissing the charges on Monday, the three-member district court in Paralimni ruled the testimony of the 20-year-old had not been credible because it “lacked coherence and contained numerous substantial contradictions”. The defendants, Israelis aged between 19 and 20, claimed sexual contact with the woman had been consensual.

But her lawyer, Michael Polak, described the assertion as absurd. “The young lady in this case is gay, any suggestion that she voluntarily agreed to group sex with men she had never met before, who were speaking in a different language, is ridiculous,” he told the Guardian. “She has been left completely distraught by the court’s verdict today. It was one of the hardest phone calls I have ever had to make.”

In February, another British woman who also claimed she had been gang-raped in Ayia Napa by more than a dozen Israeli men in July 2019 won a “monumental victory” over Cypriot authorities after the Strasbourg-based tribunal ruled they had “failed in their obligation to effectively investigate the applicant’s complaint of rape”.

Berlin’s immigration authorities are moving to deport four young foreign residents on allegations related to participation in protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, an unprecedented move that raises serious concerns over civil liberties in Germany.

The deportation orders, issued under German migration law, were made amid political pressure and over internal objections from the head of the state of Berlin’s immigration agency.

The internal strife arose because three of those targeted for deportation are citizens of European Union member states who normally enjoy freedom of movement between E.U. countries. None of the four has been convicted of any crimes.

“What we’re seeing here is straight out of the far right’s playbook,” said Alexander Gorski, a lawyer representing two of the protesters. “You can see it in the U.S. and Germany, too: Political dissent is silenced by targeting the migration status of protesters.”

Berlin’s immigration authorities are moving to deport four young foreign residents on allegations related to participation in protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, an unprecedented move that raises serious concerns over civil liberties in Germany.

The deportation orders, issued under German migration law, were made amid political pressure and over internal objections from the head of the state of Berlin’s immigration agency.

The internal strife arose because three of those targeted for deportation are citizens of European Union member states who normally enjoy freedom of movement between E.U. countries. None of the four has been convicted of any crimes.

“What we’re seeing here is straight out of the far right’s playbook,” said Alexander Gorski, a lawyer representing two of the protesters. “You can see it in the U.S. and Germany, too: Political dissent is silenced by targeting the migration status of protesters.”

It was the town hall that wasn’t supposed to happen.

For the better part of two hours Friday night, pissed-off Hoosiers jeered, chanted, and booed at Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., one of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s most fervent supporters in Congress.

It was a case in point for why senior Republican leaders have advised their members against holding such events at all.

Spartz, however, is often at odds with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. She plowed through the taunts as a crowd outside shouted, “Do your job!” Inside, the crowd roared in anger at mentions of Elon Musk and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Brian Jonasen, an Air Force veteran who has helped organize protests at the Indiana Statehouse, said, “The one thing we hope that maybe she takes back with her is that the people are mad. They are angry.”