Author: staff

China signed an expanded version of a free trade agreement Tuesday with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, with Chinese Premier Li Qiang pitching expanded economic ties with his country as an alternative to the protectionist policies of US President Donald Trump. Li Qiang told an ASEAN-China summit meeting after the signing that closer cooperation could help overcome global economic uncertainties. He said, “Pursuing confrontation instead of solidarity brings no benefit” in the face of economic coercion and bullying, in a swipe at the US. “Unity is strength,” he said. The signing of the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area 3.0 came…

The study noted similar downtrends in the U.K. (0.78, down 0.01), the U.S. (0.68, down 0.028), Russia (0.41, down 0.049) and Ukraine (0.48, down 0.007). Russia recorded the sharpest overall decline between 2024 and 2025 of any nation studied, while the marked retreat of the rule of law in the U.S. placed it between Slovenia and Portugal in a ranking of EU, EFTA and North American countries. At the other end of the scale, Denmark was the EU’s strongest rule-of-law performer (0.90) within the EU and EFTA, followed by Norway, Finland and Sweden. The study identified a weakening in how…

President Donald Trump began one of his busiest days of the Asia trip on Tuesday by warmly greeting the new Japanese Prime Minister, with plans to later speak to US troops aboard an aircraft carrier and mingle with business leaders. Although Trump is visiting one of America’s most steadfast allies in Asia, there’s no shortage of uncertainty while he’s there. Sanae Takaichi, who became the country’s first female prime minister only days ago, must solidify her relationship with Trump while defending her country’s economic interests. Trump is trying to nail down $550 billion in Japanese investment as part of a…

“I think it will come — and be more and more visible,” said the prime minister’s political director, Balázs Orbán, when asked about the potential for a Ukraine-skeptic alliance to start acting as a bloc in the European Council. “It worked very well during the migration crisis. That’s how we could resist,” he said of the so-called Visegrad 4 group made up of Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia and Poland at a time when the Euroskeptic Law and Justice Party was in power in Warsaw following 2015. Then-Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki led the charge as the alliance’s biggest member, with the “V4” group…

Small boats carrying asylum-seekers continue to cross the English Channel, with numbers for this year already surpassing the 2024 total. In a farcical twist, one migrant, removed to France with much fanfare under the government’s flagship “one in, one out” deterrent scheme, arrived back on U.K. shores by small boat less than a month after being deported.  More damaging still, on Friday an asylum-seeker jailed for sexually assaulting a teenager — and whose crimes sparked a wave of protests in the U.K. over the summer — was mistakenly released from prison, prompting a weekend manhunt. He was eventually re-arrested on Sunday morning…

There are concerns that the Moscow-allied Belarusian state has become a hub for circumventing restrictions on plane parts and other key components that the Kremlin struggles to obtain due to massive sanctions imposed by the EU and its Western partners. At the same time, Budrys went on, the EU needs to “get serious” on plans to tariff Belarus’ remaining exports to the bloc, calling for punitive new levies “on Belarusian exports and goods and also on Russian.” According to the Lithuanian government, the balloon incursions are a tactic in its “hybrid war” against the West, which has for years also…

The suggestion comes after EU leaders discussed competitiveness and climate policy at a summit last week and pitched ideas to unlock the stalemate in the negotiations. A number of leaders called on the EU to set pragmatic climate goals and introduce more flexibilities to reach them, something that is now reflected in the new compromise document. But allowing the EU to decelerate its climate efforts could see it miss the 2040 goal, or force it to rely on other instruments to reach it, such as outsourcing more emissions cuts to poorer countries. Offering flexibilities The Danish presidency proposes to introduce…

A former Lukoil executive, granted anonymity to speak freely, said the move could see the company’s revenues and profits plummet by “about 30 percent,” as it is forced it to sell three refineries and around half of its roughly 5,000 petrol stations worldwide. “Lukoil is finished,” they told POLITICO.  The move comes days after the U.S. blacklisted Lukoil, as well as oil and gas firm Rosneft, in a surprise sanctions package that it said was “a result of Russia’s lack of serious commitment to a peace process to end the war in Ukraine.” “Given [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s refusal to…

BERLIN — Friedrich Merz a affiché clairement ses ambitions en mai dernier : faire de la Bundeswehr “l’armée conventionnelle la plus forte d’Europe” et s’engage à lui donner “toutes les ressources financières dont elle a besoin”. Cinq mois plus tard, le chancelier allemand souhaite mettre des équipements en face de ces ambitions, selon de nouveaux documents internes du gouvernement vus par POLITICO. Une liste tentaculaire de 39 pages présente 377 milliards d’euros d’achats souhaités dans les domaines terrestre, aérien, maritime, spatial et cyber. Elle donne un aperçu de la planification des achats d’armements qui seront précisés dans le budget 2026…

POLITICO: So, in your view, is it a mistake to give space in the public debate to this type of argument? Calenda: No, I’m a liberal, I believe all viewpoints should be allowed, but they must be put into context. For example, if I were introducing Sachs as a journalist, I would say: “A journalist who has over time taken positions close to Russia, and who a few months ago took part in the Forum of the Future 2050, organized by Alexander Dugin, the ideologue who believes the West is degenerate and that Russia must restore imperial values.” Viewers deserve…