Author: staff
European lawmaker Bernd Lange, responsible for the European Parliament’s negotiations on the EU-U.S. trade deal, told POLITICO he believed the Trump administration’s announcement made a final deal more likely. Lange noted that the U.S. administration had scrapped 50 percent tariffs on many steel derived items, bringing some, like motorcycles, to the agreed 15 percent levels. In other cases, however, a special 25 percent rate applied. “The US is increasingly adopting a stance of not further breaching the Scotland Deal,” said the EU lawmaker. But, he added, “we wanted a little bit more, so let’s see.” The White House also confirmed…
She was again questioned by the police on Friday morning as part of an investigation into a social media post she wrote last week expressing solidarity with Japanese terrorist Kōzō Okamoto. Okamoto was convicted of a terrorist attack that killed 26 people at Ben Gurion International Airport in 1972. In her post on Friday, Hassan, who is an MEP with the hard-left France Unbowed party, said she had two types of CBD, a chemical that is found in the cannabis plant but does not have the same intoxicating effects as THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. The first type…
By Rédaction Africanews with Jeremiah Fisayo-Bambi Published on 02/04/2026 – 11:08 GMT+2•Updated 03/04/2026 – 8:00 GMT+2 Former Malawian leader Lazarus Chakwera has delivered a blunt warning about the cost of reform in office, saying efforts to tackle corruption can quickly turn leaders into targets. “The fight you engage in fights back,” Chakwera said in an interview on Africanews’ Global Conversation, reflecting on his presidency and the backlash he faced while attempting to expose wrongdoing. Elected in 2020 on a reformist, anti-corruption platform, Chakwera said his time in office was quickly overtaken by overlapping crises, from the global shock of the COVID-19 pandemic to…
ATHENS — Margaritis Schinas, a former European Commission vice president, is set to take over the Greek agriculture ministry after a widening farm fraud scandal prompted the resignation of three top government officials. Agriculture Minister Konstantinos Tsiaras, Civil Protection Minister Ioannis Kefalogiannis and Deputy Health Minister Dimitris Vartzopoulos stepped down Friday after being implicated in fresh allegations from the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) earlier this week. The European investigations are chipping deeper into the ranks of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ center-right New Democracy party. They focus on dozens of cases in which Greeks allegedly received EU agricultural funds for pastureland…
In Kakanj, an industrial town in the heart of Bosnia and Herzegovina, everything revolves around lignite. Thousands of jobs depend on it. Here lie 440 million tonnes of coal, one of the largest deposits in Europe. I get special authorisation to enter the huge open-cast pit. Coal was already being mined in Kakanj during the time of the Austrian emperor. Before World War I, some five thousand miners toiled here. Today, there are still 1200. One of them is Omer Hrustić: “I was literally a kid when my uncle brought me to the work site. Yeah, it’s three generations, literally.…
Published on 03/04/2026 – 15:39 GMT+2 President Donald Trump said on Friday that the United States could “open” the Strait of Hormuz and “take the oil” if it has more time. “With a little more time, we can easily OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE. IT WOULD BE A ‘GUSHER’ FOR THE WORLD???” Trump posted. The message, on his Truth Social platform, did not explain how the United States could end Iranian control over the Hormuz waterway or what oil Trump was referring to. Lying between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, the…
Swedish authorities suspect the vessel may be part of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, a covert network of mostly aging oil tankers used to circumvent sanctions imposed after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. In a post on X, Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin said the “older, inadequately insured tankers that circumvent sanctions pose a significant security and environmental threat” to the country. “The government views the incident with grave concern, even though this time it is not a matter of a large-scale oil spill,” he added. It is the third time this year that Swedish authorities have boarded a suspected false-flagged vessel. Last…
Published on 03/04/2026 – 14:40 GMT+2•Updated 14:48 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday that Israeli air strikes have destroyed about 70% of Iran’s steel production capacity, significantly hindering its ability to manufacture weapons. Steel is a strategically important material used in industrial and military production, including of missiles, drones and ships. “Together with our American friends, we continue to crush the terror regime in Iran. We are eliminating commanders, bombing bridges, bombing infrastructures,” Netanyahu said in a video statement. “In recent days, the Air Force has destroyed 70% of Iran’s steel production capacity,” he said. “This is a tremendous…
“We’ve simplified it,” said a senior administration official, who was granted anonymity per the terms of a press call. “Made it much more simple to import to America.”But the official also said the move would eliminate the “windfall” companies receive as a result of “artificially reducing their price” of production and then charging U.S. consumers far more.The announcements come on the one-year anniversary of what the president deemed “Liberation Day,” the date on which he imposed a set of sweeping tariffs on U.S. trading partners that rattled the worldwide economy and were eventually ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.They signal…
Moscow will not tolerate Armenia’s closer ties with the EU, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan during a rare and tense meeting at the Kremlin on Wednesday, issuing a not-so-veiled threat over Russian gas supplies to the neighbouring country. “We see that there is a discussion in Armenia about developing relations with the European Union,” Putin said at the meeting with Pashinyan, adding that Moscow treats it “absolutely calmly”. “But it should be obvious and honestly stated upfront that membership in a customs union with both the EU and the Eurasian Economic Union is impossible,” Putin…