Paris-Est closure to shift Luxembourg TGVs to Gare de Lyon station over a weekend later this year

France deficit to exceed 5% of GDP after economy flatlines, says French finance minister

Paris-Est closure to shift Luxembourg TGVs to Gare de Lyon station over a weekend later this year

France deficit to exceed 5% of GDP after economy flatlines, says French finance minister

Kramatorsk and Slovyansk are now the main focus of Russian ground assaults, and residents are being told to leave.

The father had threatened to kill a female primary school teacher for disciplining his son in class.

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday used remarks commemorating the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 to draw a parallel between the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans and the ongoing U.S. war with Iran. Speaking at the Pentagon, where 184 people were killed, Hegseth said that the United States still faces enemies seeking to inflict harm on Americans, and portrayed the Iran war as part of the continued U.S. fight against terrorism. “The struggle against evil continued and it continues now,” Hegseth said. “There are still enemies who hate us. Every day enemies plot to curb our power and kill our citizens, including from Islamic terrorists abroad and at home.” During the commemoration, Hegseth touted the damage inflicted on Iran during the last six months of fighting, saying the U.S. has killed Iranian leaders, destroyed the country’s air force and eliminated its defenses. “We are ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon,” Hegseth said. “The economic pressure tightens every day. We control the Strait [of Hormuz]. We will finish this fight.” The remarks injected the Trump administration’s current military campaign into an event centered on remembering the victims of the country’s deadliest terrorist attack. Trump stayed largely on message during the speech, focusing it on the victims of the attacks and the national unity that followed. But he also used the ceremony to recognize U.S. troops currently overseas. “We salute the service members working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said.

BRUSSELS — A senior EU lawmaker has slammed Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s open endorsement of a space deal that awaits competition scrutiny as an “abuse of power”. In a rare intervention on Thursday, von der Leyen told a space summit in Paris that she viewed a planned €6.5 billion joint venture between the bloc’s top satellite players as exactly the type of industrial champion that the bloc needs to lead in the space economy of tomorrow. Her remarks drew a stinging rebuke from liberal MEP Stéphanie Yon-Courtin, who anchored the European Parliament’s last annual competition report. “Endorsing a merger at a conference covered by the media, without any substantive review, is an abuse of power and misconduct,” the French MEP wrote on X. Von der Leyen was referring to Project Bromo, a joint venture between satellite makers Airbus, Leonardo and Thales to compete, at least in part, with the Starlink satellite-internet service operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which recently went public in the U.S. and is valued around $2 trillion. “These are the types of industrial champions we need if Europe is to lead in the space economy of tomorrow,” von der Leyen said.  Her words would have been music to the ears of the summit host, French President Emmanuel Macron, who has publicly backed the project together with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. But they raised red flags with the antitrust community in Brussels, where the project has yet to be formally notified or assessed by the EU executive’s competition department led by Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera. “What is the point of Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera and the Directorate General for Competition if it is the president of the Commission who unilaterally decides a case?” Yon-Courtin asked. Eyebrow raiser Von der Leyen’s comments, which come nearly a year after the Bromo partners first announced their three-way deal, also raised eyebrows among competition lawyers and corporate lobbyists. It is highly unusual for EU officials to comment on live merger matters: the Commission received a rap on the knuckles in 2015 from the European Ombudsman after former competition chief Joaquín Almunia made public comments on an ongoing investigation into a banking cartel.  But dealmakers and their advisers are also starting to come to terms with the new reality: DG Competition’s authority no longer stretches as far as it did in the days of powerful former Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.  “It was certainly surprising, particularly for lawyers, but I think it was intentional,” John Davies, a veteran antitrust lawyer and consultant at Brunswick, told POLITICO. “The president has clear views about how merger control should now develop and took the opportunity to put a political marker down.” German center-right lawmaker Andreas Schwab, also a competition expert, suggested a more nuanced reading of the president’s comments. “It was a political comment on the strength of the European industry, not an authorization decision,” he told POLITICO. The Commission declined to comment, noting that the proposed merger had yet to be formally notified. Thriving or surviving Von der Leyen has sought to take ownership of the bloc’s policy to vet corporate deals — in response to demands from France and Germany to bend the EU’s antitrust rulebook to allow for the creation of “European champions.”  In particular, she has championed an overhaul of the EU’s merger guidelines that would give increased weight to considerations such as innovation, saying these would help companies “to thrive, scale, and innovate.” But von der Leyen’s assertiveness has put her at odds with Ribera, her Spanish number two, who has defended the traditional role of the EU’s trustbusters in fighting corporate abuse of dominance that inflicts harm on consumers. “A blank check for companies to merge under whatever circumstances will not make Europe more competitive,” Ribera told a conference at the OECD in Paris last week. “Scale, in itself, is not a goal.” Backers of the space deal say, for their part, that Project Bromo is a matter of survival for the European space industry against competitors from outside the bloc that have leads in technology, scale and access to funding. None of the three companies can go it alone, Airbus defense and space chief Michael Schoellhorn, warned in an interview with POLITICO in January. European manufacturers have struggled against larger U.S. competitors as the market shifts from expensive, bespoke satellites toward mass-produced constellations and integrated space services. Bromo is meant to pool engineering, production and research across Europe’s biggest players, creating the kind of cross-border industrial champion already represented in cross-border European missile maker MBDA. But it wouldn’t compete broadly against SpaceX and would have a joint corporate structure rather than being fully vertically integrated. Chris Lunday contributed reporting.

US President Donald Trump observed Friday’s 25th anniversary by speaking about 9/11 at a ceremony at the Pentagon commemorating the lives lost when al-Qaeda militants hijacked planes and killed nearly 3,000 people in three locations, upending American foreign policy and national security.

Dulcie Leimbach, editor and co-founder of PassBlue, was a journalist in New York working for the New York Times at the time of the September 11 terror attacks. She shared her memories of that day with France 24. "I saw bodies falling from the North Tower," she recalls.

A Palestine Action prisoner's mother, politician George Galloway and a leftist news outlet are among those speaking up.

Months of anti-foreigner protests across South Africa have forced tens of thousands to leave the country.

Inflation remained stubbornly elevated at 3.4% in August at the end of a week of surging oil prices

Surging cost for fuel critical to agriculture and industry stokes price pressures as Americans confront affordability crunch

The police in Belgium, France, Ireland and the Netherlands say they suspect a fraud network of faking identities and duplicating microchips for hundreds of horses.

As Europe grapples with an era of American retren