Europe

The government reshuffle was triggered by the resignation of Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas.

France’s embattled prime minister looks likely to be ousted and his government toppled next month in a high-stakes confidence vote that could plunge the EU’s second-biggest economy into even deeper political crisis.

The leader of the opposition party National Rally (RN), Jordan Bardella, said his far-right party would “never vote in favour of a government whose decisions are making the French suffer”. Bayrou had in effect announced “the end of his government”, he said.

Manuel Bompard of the radical left Unbowed France (LFI) said: “The chips are down, and it is up to everyone to stake out their position clearly.” His party’s deputies “will vote on 8 September to bring down the government”, Bompard said.

The Green party leader, Marine Tondelier, said on social media her parliamentary group would also vote against the government, as did the Communist party (PCF). Tondelier said Bayrou’s announcement amounted “de facto to a resignation”.

Olivier Faure, the leader of the centre-left Socialist party (PS), also said it would vote against the government. Bayrou had “chosen to go”, Faure said, adding that it was “unimaginable” that PS or any other opposition party would vote for him.

Bayrou acknowledged that the vote was a gamble. “Yes, it’s risky – but it’s even riskier not to do anything,” he told a press conference. France’s budget deficit hit 5.8% of GDP last year, nearly double the official EU limit of 3%.

Postal services across Europe have suspended most parcel shipments to the US, citing widespread uncertainty about the impact of new import tariffs announced by Donald Trump.

France’s La Poste on Monday joined other operators, including Germany’s Deutsche Post, Spain’s Correos, Poste Italiane and the Belgian, Swedish and Danish postal services, which all halted a majority of US-bound shipments over the weekend.

Austria’s Österreichische Post and the UK’s Royal Mail said they would stop accepting packages on Tuesday, to allow enough time for packages posted before then to arrive in the US before the tariffs, scheduled to come into force at the end of August, kick in.

France summoned the American ambassador Charles Kushner after he wrote a letter to President Emmanuel Macron alleging France had failed to do enough to stem antisemitic violence, a French foreign ministry spokesperson said on Sunday.

Kushner, who is Jewish and whose son is married to US President Donald Trump’s daughter, published the open letter in the Wall Street Journal amid deep divides between France and the US and Israel.

Kushner’s letter to Macron noted that Monday was “the 81st anniversary of the Allied Liberation of Paris, which ended the deportation of Jews from French soil” under Nazi German occupation.

Standing outside Germany’s parliament in June, Ahmad Shikh Ali fought back tears as he held up a blurry photo of his three-year-old son. Since fleeing Aleppo more than two years ago, Shikh Ali had done all he could to secure his son a safe future: moving to Hanover, getting full-time employment and wading through endless paperwork so that his wife and son could join him.

He was close to reuniting with his family, with just two cases in front of his in the queue. That was, until Germany’s lower house of parliament passed a bill in June to suspend family reunifications for migrants like him for at least two years.

“Since I learned of this decision I can’t sleep, I can’t get on with my life,” Shikh Ali told reporters as he broke into tears. “My son was crawling when I left him; he is walking now.”

It is a hint of how people’s lives have been reshaped in recent months as a handful of governments in the EU move to restrict family reunification. While campaigners have contextualised the measures as part of a wider push by politicians to be seen as tough on migration, they say the focus on family reunification is misguided.

The European Union's economy would have looked far weaker after the pandemic without foreign workers, European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde said Saturday, warning policymakers not to ignore migration’s role even as it fuels political tensions.

Speaking at the U.S. Federal Reserve’s annual symposium in Wyoming, Lagarde said an influx of foreign labor helped the eurozone absorb successive shocks like soaring energy costs and record inflation, while keeping growth and jobs intact. Employment in the bloc expanded by 4.1 percent between late 2021 and mid-2025, nearly matching gains in gross domestic product (GDP), she noted.

“Although they represented only around 9 percent of the total labor force in 2022, foreign workers have accounted for half of its growth over the past three years,” Lagarde told the gathering of central bankers. Without that contribution, she added, “labor market conditions could be tighter and output lower.”

Lagarde singled out Germany and Spain as examples. Germany’s GDP would be about 6 percent lower today without migrant labor, while Spain’s strong recovery also “owes much” to foreign workers, she said. Across the eurozone, employment has expanded by more than 4 percent since 2021, even as central bankers pushed through the steepest rate hikes in a generation.

A lawyer representing the online message board 4chan says it won't pay a proposed fine by the UK's media regulator as it enforces the Online Safety Act.

According to Preston Byrne, managing partner of law firm Byrne & Storm, Ofcom has provisionally decided to impose a £20,000 fine "with daily penalties thereafter" for as long as the site fails to comply with its request.

"Ofcom's notices create no legal obligations in the United States," he told the BBC, adding he believed the regulator's investigation was part of an "illegal campaign of harassment" against US tech firms.

"The welfare state that we have today can no longer be financed with what we produce in the economy," Merz said in the town of Osnabrück.

The coalition partners had already agreed to reforming the social insurance system, which covers health insurance, pensions and unemployment benefits, due to rising costs and gaps in the federal budget.

https://archive.md/MaP18

A UDA gang is warning that it plans to force every immigrant out of the Rathcoole estate in Newtownabbey.

Loyalist thugs who burnt two cars belonging to a foreign-born family and spray-painted threatening graffiti on their home have drawn up a ‘hit-list’ of others to be targeted.

https://archive.md/HBLb5

The latest court hearing in the ‘terrorism’ case against singer Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh of Irish rap band Kneecap has once again thrown the spotlight on the British government’s efforts to smear and imprison the politically active.

Speaking from his macabre curiosities shop in Essex in a recent YouTube interview, Scragg wears a shabby bowler hat, has tribal-style face tattoos and a ginger beard that descends into three pendulous dreadlocks.

There is no suggestion the sale of these items is illegal, but experts, including Dame Sue Black, one of the UK’s leading forensic scientists, are calling for a crackdown on the trade in human remains.

They say the lack of regulation means much of the buying and selling of skulls and bones falls into a legal grey zone; and that the growing online market risks fuelling a new era of “body snatching”, with reports of bones being removed from crypts and graveyards in the UK and abroad.

“You’ve got people who are breaking into mausolea and who are taking remains away to sell them for people who think this is gothic, quaint [or] supernatural,” said Black, the president of St John’s College, Oxford. “If you can make the sale of a bird’s nest illegal, surely to goodness you can make the sale of a human body illegal. Having a necklace made out of somebody’s teeth isn’t acceptable to people.”