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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.

Dogma: Resurrected, A 25th Anniversary Celebration with Kevin Smith hits theaters June 5th 2025.

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.