Europe

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.06.21-163843/https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/germany-hire-11000-more-military-personnel-this-year-bild-reports-2025-06-21/

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.06.20-141716/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/technology/us-tech-europe-microsoft-trump-icc.html

When President Trump issued an executive order in February against the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for investigating Israel for war crimes, Microsoft was suddenly thrust into the middle of a geopolitical fight.

For years, Microsoft had supplied the court — which is based in The Hague in the Netherlands and investigates and prosecutes human rights breaches, genocides and other crimes of international concern — with digital services such as email. Mr. Trump’s order abruptly threw that relationship into disarray by barring U.S. companies from providing services to the prosecutor, Karim Khan.

Soon after, Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., suspended Mr. Khan’s I.C.C. email account, freezing him out of communications with colleagues just a few months after the court had issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel for his country’s actions in Gaza.

Microsoft’s swift compliance with Mr. Trump’s order, reported earlier by The Associated Press, shocked policymakers across Europe. It was a wake-up call for a problem far bigger than just one email account, stoking fears that the Trump administration would leverage America’s tech dominance to penalize opponents, even in allied countries like the Netherlands. (…)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/41927759

https://archive.is/a2U6t

ArcelorMittal said it would turn down €1.3bn in public subsidies aimed at supporting it in adapting facilities in Bremen and Eisenhüttenstadt to use hydrogen rather than coal in its steel furnaces.

It has also warned that it could shut its flagship green ethanol plant in Belgium because of restrictive EU regulation defining biofuels and emissions reductions that means that it would have to sell its output at a loss.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/41926212

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.06.20-210634/https://www.ft.com/content/1ca893d0-7384-45c6-b305-904fb2f6c0af

German public opinion has shifted dramatically against Israel, with 57% now holding a negative view of the country following its military actions in Gaza, according to a new survey released Friday.

The poll by Allensbach research institute for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper marks a striking reversal from 2022, when only 23% expressed negative views of Israel.

The survey found growing concerns about Israel's military attacks, with 65% of Germans considering Israel's actions in Gaza “inappropriate.” Only 13% voiced support for the military campaign.

In a particularly notable finding, 73% of respondents indicated they saw “some truth” in the statement that Israel's actions in Gaza constitute “genocide,” while only 9% explicitly rejected this characterization.

In the wake of the tragic and violent Islamophobic murder of Aboubakar Cissé — who was stabbed 57 times in a mosque — Muslims were left to grieve for both his loss and the countless lives lost in Palestine.

The State had the opportunity to halt its relentless Islamophobic agenda. It did the exact opposite. The Minister of the Interior refused to visit the mosque where the murder took place, and on 21 May he divulged a report on the alleged infiltration of French society by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The publication exacerbated an already intense moral panic, depicting Muslims as conspirators on the verge of seizing power. Ten days after the publication, a second racist murder occurred: a man stabbed his Tunisian neighbour, Hicham Miraoui, to death and subsequently published a series of videos on social media in which he declared his racism.

The British government will move to ban the activist group Palestine Action and proscribe it as a terrorist organisation, after two activists broke into the UK's largest airbase on Friday on electric scooters and damaged two Royal Air Force (RAF) planes.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper will submit a statement before parliament on Monday which if passed will make it illegal to be a member of the group, the BBC reported.

Footage shared by Palestine Action purported to show two protesters riding scooters towards the RAF planes on the runway at the Brize Norton airbase, where they used "repurposed fire extinguishers to spray red paint into the turbine engines" and "caused further damage using crowbars". The activists then evaded security and escaped the base.

The group announced on its website on Friday that the airbase was targeted because flights leave daily from there "for RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, a base used for military operations in Gaza and across the Middle East".

BRUSSELS — Israel’s actions in Gaza may have violated the terms of the country’s agreement with the EU, the bloc’s diplomatic corps found.

“On the basis of the assessments made by the independent international institutions … there are indications that Israel would be in breach of its human rights obligations under Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement,” the European External Action Service (EEAS) concluded, according to a leaked document seen by POLITICO.

Kallas told lawmakers in the European Parliament on Wednesday that “Israel has the right to self-defense, but what we see in practice from Israel goes beyond self-defense,” adding that Israel is “undermining decades of humanitarian principles” by blocking food and medicine for Palestinians in Gaza, along with sidestepping U.N. aid.