Europe

A second power outage in two days his hit the French Riviera region after a fire at a substation in Nice overnight, which authorities said was caused by a malicious act.

At least 45,000 homes were affected after the blaze broke out at around 02:00 local time (01:00 BST) on Sunday, a day after nearby Cannes suffered a massive blackout that was blamed on suspected sabotage.

Police in Nice say "tyre tracks" were found and the door to the substation, in the west of the city, was "broken", according to local media reports.

Nice Airport, the tramway network, and neighbouring towns of Saint-Laurent-du-Var and Cagnes-sur-Mer, were impacted before power was restored later in the morning.

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It came a day after Cannes suffered a major blackout during the international film festival. Officials said it may have been caused by an arson attack on a substation.

Around 160,000 homes in the city and surrounding areas lost power.

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Archived version of Reuters article (archive.li)

Archived

Oleh Ivashchenko, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, reported this.

“We have confirmed information that China is supplying machine tools, special chemicals, gunpowder, and components directly to Russian military plants. We have verified data on 20 such factories,” he shared.

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He added that between 2024 and 2025, at least five instances of aviation-related cooperation were documented, involving equipment, spare parts, and technical documentation. In six additional cases, large shipments of special chemicals were delivered.

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According to the FISU, as of early 2025, 80% of the critical electronics used in Russian drones originate from China.

The report notes that to bypass sanctions, Chinese entities use deceptive labeling and shell companies to ship microelectronics components to Russia.

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In February 2025, an investigation by the Schemes project discovered that China had become the primary — and in some cases the sole — supplier of key semi-metals to Russia following the imposition of Western sanctions.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmings.world/post/26913983

Comparisons were quickly made with - and expectations tied to - last year's Pelicot mass rape trial in southern France and the massive global attention it garnered.

Instead, the trial of France's most prolific known paedophile, Joel Le Scouarnec - a retired surgeon who has admitted in court to raping or sexually assaulting 299 people, almost all of them children - is coming to an end this Wednesday amid widespread frustration.

"I'm exhausted. I'm angry. Right now, I don't have much hope. Society seems totally indifferent. It's frightening to think [the rapes] could happen again," one of Le Scouarnec's victims, Manon Lemoine, 36, told the BBC.

Archived

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In 2023 and 2024, the Spanish government authorized nine extraditions to continue through judicial channels, and at least one person has already been handed over to Chinese authorities. On October 29, 2024, after almost two years in prison, this 41-year-old man, wanted for fraud, was released from Madrid’s Soto del Real prison to be extradited to the People’s Republic of China. “I have no information about his situation or treatment in China, except that he is awaiting trial,” confirms the lawyer who defended him during the process, Carlos Aguirre de Cárcer.

The lack of guarantees that extradited individuals would receive humane and fair treatment in China was the reason why the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) prohibited Poland from extraditing Taiwanese Hung Tao Liu in a landmark judgment, Liu v. Poland. Reports by the United Nations and non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International found, in the eyes of the seven judges, “the use of torture and ill-treatment” in Chinese prisons and detention centers “to such an extent that it may amount to a situation of generalized violence.”

The lack of guarantees that extradited individuals would receive humane and fair treatment in China was the reason why the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) prohibited Poland from extraditing Taiwanese Hung Tao Liu in a landmark judgment, Liu v. Poland. Reports by the United Nations and non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International found, in the eyes of the seven judges, “the use of torture and ill-treatment” in Chinese prisons and detention centers “to such an extent that it may amount to a situation of generalized violence.”

Consequently, the ECHR exempted Liu from having to prove a specific personal risk, given that the extradition request indicated that, once in China, he would be placed in a detention center, which was “sufficient” to deny the extradition. “An individual requesting protection must be guaranteed the benefit of the doubt,” reads the judgment of October 6, 2022.

Since the ruling became final in January 2023, Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands and Norway have not handed over any person wanted by the Chinese authorities, as confirmed to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) by various authorities in these countries within the framework of China Targets, an investigation coordinated by the ICIJ, in which EL PAÍS participate.

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Luis Chabaneix, founder and director of a Madrid-based firm specializing in extraditions that has managed to stop two extraditions to China in extremis in recent months, believes that, despite the extradition treaty and the alignment of interests that may exist between governments — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has traveled to China three times on official visits — “deep down, judges are almost ashamed to send someone there” and agree to suspend them for a variety of reasons.

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Sometimes, however, the reasons run much deeper. Chabaneix’s legal firm defended a Chinese businessman detained in Marbella and wanted by Beijing for an alleged corporate crime. The case met all the formal requirements, but Chabaneix claimed that the accusation had been fabricated using a partner’s statement obtained under torture.

The partner, who currently lives in the United States, testified in writing before the Spanish High Court that he spent 14 months imprisoned in the Beijing Municipal Security Bureau “sleeping on the floor, with the lights permanently on, frequently subjected to physical punishment, coercion, and insinuation to fabricate false evidence against himself and the defendant," according to the ruling by the Third Section of the Criminal Chamber of the High Court.

All of this occurred during the same time that the Spanish government was demanding China guarantee in writing that it would respect the human rights of the English teacher it was seeking to extradite.

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Meanwhile, a new appeal originating in Spain and headed to Strasbourg is underway. In addition to the man extradited from the Soto del Real prison in October, the High Court had authorized at least a second extradition, but an appeal has managed to suspend it, for the time being. The extraditable man, another Chinese businessman being pursued by Beijing, is an asylum seeker with a son who holds Spanish nationality and the court ruled that the petition must wait for his request to be resolved, according to his lawyer, Inmaculada Cruz Guillén.

The case will reach Strasbourg via Rome, says Cruz Guillén. An Italian law firm has appealed the case to the ECHR from the Italian capital, where the European Convention on Human Rights, ratified by Spain in 1979, was signed in 1950.

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Army recruiters in Moscow are tricking Russians into signing military contracts with fake job listings that promise no front-line combat, the exiled news outlet Vyorstka reported Friday.

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Dozens of ads seeking “drivers, security guards and construction workers in the rear” have reportedly appeared on platforms like Avito since at least March. But according to sources in the Moscow Mayor’s Office, these listings are part of a Defense Ministry contractor campaign to inflate recruitment numbers and secure bonus payouts.

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Sources said the contractors behind the fake job listings don’t have the authority to assign recruits to non-combat roles. “It’s a lure to attract more people,” one recruiter, whose number appeared in an ad, told Vyorstka. An official called it “the most obvious 100% scam.”

Once recruits arrive at a military enlistment center on Yablochkova Street in northern Moscow, they rarely turn down the contract.

One man from Krasnodar said he was promised a 12-month contract and given a free flight to Moscow — only to discover upon arrival that the terms were indefinite. He signed anyway.

“The typical portrait of someone who has been deceived is provincial, naive, willfully ignorant, and one who has not previously served,” said a Moscow official.

Russian forces launched a barrage of 367 drones and missiles at Ukrainian cities overnight, including the capital Kyiv, in the largest aerial attack of the war so far, killing at least 12 people and injuring dozens more, officials said.

The dead included three children in the northern region of Zhytomyr, local officials there said.

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In northeastern Ukraine, Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said early on Sunday that drones hit three city districts and injured three people. Blasts shattered windows in high-rise apartment blocks.

Drone strikes killed a 77-year-old man and injured five people in the southern city of Mykolaiv, the regional governor said. He published a picture of a residential apartment block with a large hole from an explosion and rubble scattered over the ground.

In the western region of Khmelnytskyi, many hundreds of kilometres away from the frontlines of fighting, four people were killed and five others wounded, according to the governor.

"Without pressure, nothing will change and Russia and its allies will only build up forces for such murders in Western countries," the Ukrainian president's chief of staff Andriy Yermak wrote on Telegram.

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cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/190359

From BBC News via this RSS feed

Archived URL (Wayback Machine) - Original URL (in case of Wayback Machine downtime)

A small portion of the article:

At the end of May, Meta will start using Europeans’ data to train its AI. Here is how you can exercise your rights and prevent it.

Instagram and Facebook users in Europe will soon have their data and posts used by parent company Meta to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Europeans have until May 27 to restrict Meta from using their data, the date when the company will start using Europe’s data.

• Transgender people in Lithuania continue to face systemic discrimination in the labour market, including open ridicule, isolation and psychological abuse, according to experts who spoke at a parliamentary discussion marking the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia.
• A recent national survey also found that only 22% of Lithuanians would feel comfortable working with a transgender colleague. That number drops to 19% when it comes to a transgender person in a leadership role, and even lower if such a person worked at their child’s school.

Archived version of The Guardian article (archive.li)

GNU Taler begins operating in Switzerland, distributed by the Taler Operations AG. Gnu Taler aims to be a “digital wallet” and has been used by the swiss national bank as well as the european national bank as a example for how a digital currency handed out by the state could work. It aims to be as privacy preserving as cash for the buyer while not allowing the seller to evade taxes.

Currently the Taler is brought out by a special organisation, the “Taler Operations AG”, and not the national bank, although both the national bank as well as the Taler Team have shown interest in a official digial currency by the national bank based on the Taler. But we need to relativate as the national council has stated that the introduction of a digital currency would probably take relatively major legislative changes and therefore take a bit of time.

A high school science teacher in France has been suspended since late March for holding a minute's silence for the victims of Israel's war on Gaza.

Le Parisien reported on Thursday, citing education authorities, that the physics and chemistry teacher at Janot Curie high school in Sens, Yonne, was suspended on 31 March. Five days earlier, a minute's silence was held just at the end of her class to pay tribute to the victims of the war, just as Israeli forces unilaterally broke a ceasefire in Gaza and killed more than 700 Palestinians.

The decision marks the latest episode of French authorities taking punitive action over protests and remarks related to Israel’s war on Gaza. Jean-Paul Delescaut, leader of the General Confederation of Labour union, was handed a suspended one-year jail sentence for writing in response to the 7 October Hamas attacks: “The horrors of illegal occupations… are receiving the responses they provoked.”

Donald Trump has said he will impose a 50% tariff on all EU imports to the US from 1 June after claiming trade talks between the two trading blocs were “going nowhere”.

In a surprise announcement, the US president posted on his Truth Social platform that his long-running battle to secure concessions from the EU had stalled.

He accused the EU of taking advantage of the US on trade, saying: “Our discussions with them are going nowhere! Therefore I am recommending a straight 50% Tariff on the European Union, starting on June 1, 2025.”

Archived

This is an op-ed piece by Katharina Osthoff, Senior Policy Advisor at Friedrich Naumann Eurooe Foundation, and Sam Goodman, Senior Policy Director of the China Strategic Risks Institute, the co-Founder and co-Chair of the New Diplomacy Project.

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While the growing influx of competitively priced and well equipped Chinese EVs may appear the superior choice for both consumers and policymakers in Europe, they bring with them substantial economic risks. These risks threaten the domestic automotive industry, which is outmatched by Chinese EV production as well as Europe’s ambitious environmental goals that rely on a substantial shift towards EVs. Yet, the implications extend far beyond economic or ecological concerns. Chinese EVs potentially pose new challenges when it comes to the EU’s commitment to data protection abroad and at home, as well as to upholding security and global human rights standards.

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At the heart of China’s EV production lie deliberate, state-controlled industrial policies: massive state subsidies, overcapacity, and strategic export orientation. This has enabled China’s EV manufacturers to produce high-quality vehicles at near-unbeatable prices, which facilitated companies like BYD, Nio, and Chery to scale-up production rapidly and flood global markets, including in Europe. [...] Today, Beijing holds influential positions across the entire supply chain: from raw material extraction to battery production and final assembly. The EU's commitment to a green transition, which heavily relies on increasing the market share of EVs, exacerbates this issue. This situation highlights a paradox where European liberal free-market democracies are seemingly outperformed by China's state-supported enterprises.

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[European] domestic manufactures are hamstrung by fragmented national policies and underinvestment. This imbalance risks creating a structural dependency on Chinese imports. Unlike past technological shifts, this dependency is not only commercial in nature but also geopolitical. China’s overcapacity is not a market accident but rather the product of deliberate policy choices , aimed at dominating critical technologies and global value chains. The implications for the EU extend far beyond industrial competitiveness. As demonstrated in past cases of economic coercion, most notably against Lithuania, Beijing has shown its willingness to use market access and trade ties as instruments of political pressure. A future in which China controls a large share of the EU’s EV market risks giving Beijing undue influence over European policymaking, including the ability to discourage criticism of its human rights record, military posture, or foreign policy behaviour.

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Driving a Trojan Horse? Data, Security, and Surveillance

Aside from the clear economic risks that Chinese EVs present to Europe’s automotive manufacturing, growing concerns about data privacy, surveillance, and cybersecurity cannot be sidelined. As the former head of MI6 aptly put it, EVs are not just cars but “computers on wheels.” European regulators should take seriously the data security risks this implies. Under the National Intelligence Law and China’s Data Security Law, Chinese EV manufacturers and their suppliers operate under a legal obligation to cooperate with the Ministry of State Security and are prohibited from disclosing this cooperation to foreign governments, raising serious cybersecurity concerns. Chinese Communist Party cells are required to be embedded within the corporate structures of these [EV] firms, making the firewall between commercial operations and the Chinese state increasingly porous. Additionally, many manufacturers rely on software and components from firms such as DeepSeek, which have already been flagged for their data practices.

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Hidden Costs: Labour and Human Rights in the EV Supply Chain

At the same time, the EU cannot afford to ignore the human rights concerns associated with China’s EV supply chain. Beijing has secured a commanding lead in the supply chain for key battery materials with Chinese firms like BYD having established a strong presence in lithium mining and processing operations across Latin America and parts of Africa. [...] The growing scrutiny has already led to tangible shifts in corporate behaviour. Volkswagen’s recent decision to exit Xinjiang reflects growing pressure on European firms to sever ties with entities linked to systemic human rights abuses. While the company cited economic reasons for the sale, the move underscores the reputational and legal risks European firms face if they remain entangled with controversial actors in the Chinese EV ecosystem. Beyond supply chains, the ethical and legal implications of technology partnerships with Chinese firms demand closer examination. Several leading Chinese tech companies such as Hikvision and others have been implicated in surveillance activities and abuses, particularly in Xinjiang. Partnerships of this nature carry considerable reputational risks in liberal democracies and may expose European firms to secondary sanctions or consumer backlash.

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Such pragmatic policy solutions aimed at restoring the EU’s competitive edge should include:

• The EU should commit to reviewing the EU’s countervailing tariffs on Chinese EVs within the first year of the new EU Commission.
• The EU should review the EU’s current Foreign Direct Investment Regulation to focus on rules regarding joint ventures to look at local ownership requirements, data security requirements, and local content requirements.
• The EU should legally require foreign EV companies from a country where the EU does not have a data standards equivalency agreement to store data on European servers and to commit not to transfer the data overseas under any circumstances.
• The EU should negotiate economic security partnership agreements with value partners such as Japan and the Republic of Korea. One target under these partnerships would be to encourage joint ventures between European automotive producers and world leading Japanese and South Korea battery producers including Samsung, SK Innovation, Panasonic, and LG Energy Solution.
• The EU should investigate forced labour in Xinjiang, add the geographic region of Xinjiang to its forced labour risk database, and introduce guidelines for European businesses regarding the prevalence of forced labour goods in the automotive supply chain.
• European policymakers should expand tax incentives and other measures to encourage European automotive companies to work together to share research, development, and production costs for EVs.
• The European Commission should work with European Member States to coordinate Next Generation EU and Multiannual Financial Framework funds to support the development of the European EV sector, including encouraging matching private sector investment in the EV battery supply chain and EV charging infrastructure. This should serve as the frontrunner to an EU-wide Green Industrial Strategy.

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Benjamin Netanyahu was accused of slander and pursuing a war without end after he claimed the leaders of France, Canada and the UK were stoking antisemitism and siding with Hamas by demanding he end the two-month blockade of food and aid into Gaza.

In what has become an extraordinary standoff with some of Israel’s closest allies, Netanyahu appeared to deliberately raise the stakes on Thursday night by accusing his western critics of abandoning Israel in a war for its very existence.

Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, also sought to link the killing of two Israeli embassy staff members in Washington to the recent criticism mounted by European leaders.