Europe’s rightwing populist parties are split over how far to distance themselves from Donald Trump’s pressure on Ukraine, with some fearing unflinching solidarity with the US president’s brand of nationalism will damage their efforts to widen their domestic support.

Broadly, unease over Trump’s treatment of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the ominous encroach of authoritarianism by the new US administration, is strongest among the populist parties in western Europe and some Nordic countries.

By contrast in eastern Europe, where parts of the electorate view Russia sympathetically, support for Trump remains undimmed.

Eurostar and French rail services halted at Gare du Nord after WW2 bomb found

Unexploded bomb found on tracks during overnight maintenance work near France’s busiest train terminal Angelique Chrisafis in Paris and agencies Fri 7 Mar 2025 09.50 CET

Traffic at the Paris Gare du Nord train station has been halted after a second world war bomb was found on tracks leading to France’s busiest terminal, officials said.

The unexploded bomb was found in the middle of the tracks overnight during maintenance work carried out in the suburb of Saint Denis, the national SNCF rail company said.

The bomb dated from the second world war, the RER B suburban train line wrote in a post on X.

A German court has jailed five members of an extremist group linked to the Reichsbürger (Reich Citizens) movement for plotting a coup and to kidnap the health minister.

The defendants, four men, aged 46 to 58, and a 77-year-old woman, who belonged to the self-styled “United Patriots” group, were sentenced to between five years and nine months and eight years’ jail by the Koblenz higher regional court on Thursday.

A fifth defendant received a sentence of two years and 10 months, the German news agency dpa reported.

It was one of several trials targeting the wider far-right movement, whose members adhere to conspiracy theories and reject the legitimacy of the modern German state.

European leaders holding emergency talks in Brussels have agreed on a massive increase to defence spending, amid a drive to shore up support for Ukraine after Donald Trump halted US military aid and intelligence sharing.

But the show of unity was marred by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, failing to endorse an EU statement on Ukraine pushing back against Trump’s Russia-friendly negotiating stance.

The 26 other EU leaders, including Orbán’s ally Robert Fico, the Slovakian prime minister, “firmly supported” the statement. “There can be no negotiations on Ukraine without Ukraine,” said the draft statement, a response to Trump’s attempt to sideline Europe and Kyiv.

but don't worry, it had english subtitles

Serbian opposition lawmakers have lit flares and discharged teargas during the opening day of the spring session of parliament, in a sign of support for anti-corruption protests.

At the legislative session on Tuesday, after the ruling coalition led by the Serbian Progressive party (SNS) approved the agenda, some opposition politicians ran out of their seats towards the parliamentary speaker, Ana Brnabić, and scuffled with security guards.

Others tossed smoke grenades and teargas, with live TV showing black and pink smoke inside the building.

The total shows how women were deceived on a systemic basis over more than three decades. It equates to nearly a fifth of all the police spies who were sent to infiltrate political movements.

Four of the police spies fathered, or are alleged to have fathered, children with women they met while using their fake identities to infiltrate campaigners.

One woman, known as Jacqui, has said her life was “absolutely ruined” after she discovered by chance that the father of her son was an undercover officer, more than 20 years after his birth. The officer, Bob Lambert, abandoned them when the son was an infant, claiming falsely that he had to go on the run abroad to escape being arrested by police.

"Ultimately these cuts will remove food and healthcare from desperate people," Dodds said in a letter to Starmer posted on X.

On Tuesday, Starmer pledged to raise UK defence spending to 2.5 percent of GDP by 2027 but ordered the overseas development budget to be cut from 0.5 percent to 0.3 percent of gross national income to pay for it.

Dodds said while she believed defence spending needed to be increased as "the post-war global order has come crashing down", she had hoped for a collective discussion on finding the funding.

"Instead, the tactical decision was taken for ODA to absorb the entire burden," she said, referring to overseas development assistance.

Starmer admitted in a reply to her letter that cutting aid funding was "a difficult and painful decision".

All the talk now is of how we might defend ourselves without the US. But almost everyone with a voice in public life appears to be avoiding a much bigger and more troubling question: how we might defend ourselves against the US.

Germany’s next government will be a coalition of the political centre led by the conservative Friedrich Merz. That may sound like stability. Traditionally, a government made up of the two big centrist parties, the Social Democrats (SPD) and Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU), has been called the grand coalition. But it is no longer grand and offers only an illusion of stability.

The SPD achieved its worst result in a national election since the second world war, with 16.4% of the vote. The CDU scored its second-worst result, with 28.5%. If you include the Greens and the Liberals, the parties that occupy the political ground from centre-left to centre-right won just over 60% of the votes cast.

The strengthening of the AfD by the conservatives, however, follows a familiar pattern: the CDU has hardened its rhetoric and position on migration, bringing it closer to the AfD’s policies. Merz lifted the AfD to the zenith of its influence in the run-up to the election by forming a parliamentary majority with it for the first time on a symbolic resolution on migration.

A useful resource for those trying to move away from US owned products and systems

Back in 2003, the BBC aired a documentary on Israel’s nuclear programme, titled Israel’s Secret Weapon. Israeli leaders hit the roof and banned its officials from appearing on the BBC.

The documentary was spot on. Israel was embarrassed at having its nuclear arsenal exposed when Iraq was being invaded for a non-existent stash of weapons of mass destruction.

I asked a senior BBC official at the time how relations with Israel were panning out. “For a country that wants to influence news coverage, boycotting us is a strange way of doing things,” was the reply, seemingly unruffled by Israeli antics. The BBC did not cave in, and Israel lifted its boycott.

Twenty-five years later, the BBC has lost any semblance of a spine on Israel. Last week, it pulled a documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone from its online streaming platform. The corporation said it would carry out a “due diligence” exercise before it could be allowed to air again.

Evidence of a successful lobbying campaign by campus security officials emerged in an email written last August by Oliver Curran, the chair of the Association of University Chief Security Officers (Aucso), a professional body with members at more than 140 UK universities.

In the note to Aucso members, obtained by Liberty Investigates and shared with the Guardian, Curran wrote that he had met Universities UK, the body that represents vice-chancellors, after visiting a security conference in New Orleans.

He wrote: “I was extremely interested when I attended the [US campus law enforcement] conference on how they were handling the encampments and what lessons they had learnt.

“One of the first things I did when I returned to the UK was to approach [university vice-chancellors] and asked that they continually provide the UK Aucso members with the support we require. The responses were extremely reassuring.”

In 1966, after years of friction with the US over whether France should have its own independent nuclear deterrent, the French president, Charles de Gaulle, withdrew his country from Nato’s integrated command (not, however, from the alliance itself – a common misconception) and asked all US forces stationed in France to leave. In response, the US secretary of state, Dean Rusk, asked de Gaulle: “Does that include the dead Americans in military cemeteries as well?”

In a single weekend, JD Vance’s direct attacks on European democracy at the Munich Security Conference and his meeting with far-right, anti-European political forces in Germany, have given de Gaulle his historic vindication.

There are some things that you avoid saying for as long as you can, for fear that just uttering the words will help bring them into being.

Two Israeli soldiers vacationing in Amsterdam fled to Israel after pro-Palestine groups identified them and sought to pursue legal action against the pair for war crimes in Gaza.

This marks the first time active-duty soldiers have faced such a situation, as past cases primarily involved reservists, the Quds News Network (QNN) reported.

The two soldiers had posted images on social media from their deployment in northern Gaza, some depicting blindfolded Palestinian detainees – evidence of crimes, the report noted. They also shared updates about their trip to the Netherlands.

A conference in Berlin addressing issues surrounding Palestine and the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza was forcibly relocated by German police.

The “Reclaiming the Discourse: Palestine, Justice, and Truth” event – featuring UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and prominent human rights figures – was moved after the original venue “faced coercion from German politicians and Berlin police”, Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) said in a statement.

Albanese, who has faced repeated cancellations of her events in Germany, was again targeted by authorities, raising concerns over the country’s treatment of dissenting voices. “This is an outright attack on democracy and free speech,” DiEM25 said.

European imports of seaborne gas shipments fell by a fifth last year to their lowest level since the pandemic, according to a new report, while the UK’s plunged by nearly a half, but governments are continuing to spend billions on new import terminals.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found that Europe’s imports of liquefied natural gas, known as LNG, fell by 19% last year to lows not seen since 2021 as governments worked to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

However, a wave of fresh investments in new LNG import infrastructure after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has moved ahead, which could mean that infrastructure worth billions will sit idle in the years to come, the institute warned.