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      Germany Hopes to Head Off a Trade War With China

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      As the European Union moves to impose tariffs on Chinese cars, Germany, with an auto industry deeply enmeshed with China, is stuck in the middle.With billions of dollars in trade between China and the European Union at stake, Germany’s second-highest cabinet official called on Saturday for the two sides to engage in talks to try to resolve an escalating dispute over tariffs.Robert Habeck, who is Germany’s vice chancellor and minister for economic affairs and climate, said that he expected talks to begin soon between China and European officials. He expressed a hope that tariffs could be avoided.Still, he added that tariffs could be justified if the commission’s concerns about China’s subsidies for its electric car industry were not resolved.This month, the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, proposed tariffs of up to 38 percent on electric cars from China, on top of an existing 10 percent tariff on imported cars. The commission said it found that China’s electric car sector was heavily subsidized by the government and state-controlled banking system.“These tariffs are not punitive,” Mr. Habeck said, adding that the tariffs are intended to offset subsidies that violate World Trade Organization rules.But Chinese officials strongly criticized the European tariffs after meeting with him. Wang Wentao, the commerce minister, described them as protectionist and called on Germany to help end them. “It is hoped that Germany will play an active role in the E.U. and promote the E.U. and China to move toward each other,” the ministry said in a statement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      France Warned by E.U. About ‘Excessive’ Deficit

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      The rebuke for breaking European Union rules that require strict financial discipline comes two weeks before French voters head to the polls for parliamentary elections.Add an entry to the list of troubles facing President Emmanuel Macron of France less than two weeks before pivotal legislative elections: potential financial penalties by the European Union for failure to rein in the nation’s ballooning deficit and debt.The reprimand, announced Wednesday in Brussels, highlighted France’s fragile finances at a moment of political turmoil, as the far right National Rally party, led by Marine Le Pen, and a left-wing coalition, the New Popular Front, appear increasingly positioned to form a new government that could weaken Mr. Macron’s grip on power.Mr. Macron threw French politics into disarray earlier this month by calling for snap parliamentary elections after his party was battered by the far right in European Parliament elections.The fiscal warning by E.U. authorities set the stage for a possible confrontation between Brussels and Paris. Both the National Rally and the New Popular Front have pledged to spend more on public services at a time when Mr. Macron is being forced to find deep budgetary cuts of up to 25 billion euros ($26.9 billion) this year to improve the nation’s finances. The opposition parties, however, are critical of E.U. institutions, and want to ease rather than tighten fiscal policy.France is in debt to the tune of around €3 trillion, or more than 110 percent of gross domestic product, and a deficit of €154 billion, representing 5.5 percent of economic output. The budget crunch comes after Mr. Macron spent heavily to support workers and businesses during pandemic lockdowns. His government also provided subsidies to help households cope with a jump in inflation after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which sent energy prices soaring.President Emmanuel Macron has called for snap parliamentary elections, throwing French politics into disarray.Hannah Mckay/ReutersWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sweden and Iran Exchange Prisoners in a Breakthrough Swap

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      Iran released an E.U. diplomat from Sweden and a dual Iranian-Swedish national, whereas Sweden released a senior former Iranian official serving a life sentence for war crimes.Iran and Sweden exchanged prisoners on Saturday in a major breakthrough, according to the Swedish prime minister.Iran released the European Union diplomat and Swedish national Johan Floderus, who had been arrested in April 2022 in Tehran, as well as the dual national Saeed Azizi, the Swedish prime minister said.“It is with pleasure that I can announce that Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi are now on a plane home to Sweden, and will soon be reunited with their families,” the prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, said on social media.In exchange, Sweden released Hamid Noury, a high-ranking Iranian official who had been sentenced to life in a Swedish court for war crimes committed in 1988 in Iran.The swap was coordinated with the help of Oman, according to a statement published by the Omani state news agency.Vivian Nereim More

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      Macron’s Early Election Call After EU Vote Is a Huge Gamble

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      The president has challenged voters to test the sincerity of their support for the far right in European elections. Were the French letting off steam, or did they really mean it?On the face of it, there is little logic in calling an election from a position of great weakness. But that is what President Emmanuel Macron has done by calling a snap parliamentary election in France on the back of a humiliation by the far right.After the National Rally of Marine Le Pen and her popular protégé Jordan Bardella handed him a crushing defeat on Sunday in elections for the European Parliament, Mr. Macron might have done nothing, reshuffled his government, or simply altered course through stricter controls on immigration and by renouncing contested plans to tighten rules on unemployment benefits.Instead, Mr. Macron, who became president at 39 in 2017 by being a risk taker, chose to gamble that France, having voted one way on Sunday, will vote another in a few weeks.“I am astonished, like almost everyone else,” said Alain Duhamel, the prominent author of “Emmanuel the Bold,” a book about Mr. Macron. “It’s not madness, it’s not despair, but it is a huge risk from an impetuous man who prefers taking the initiative to being subjected to events.”Shock coursed through France on Monday. The stock market plunged. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, a city that will host the Olympic Games in just over six weeks, said she was “stunned” by an “unsettling” decision. “A thunderbolt,” thundered Le Parisien, a daily newspaper, across its front page.For Le Monde, it was “a jump in the void.” Raphaël Glucksmann, who guided the revived center-left socialists to third place among French parties in the European vote, accused Mr. Macron of “a dangerous game.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Greece Is Betting Big on Liquefied Natural Gas From the U.S.

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      When a withering financial crisis forced Greece to rethink its economy a decade ago, it bet big on green power​. Since then, Greece’s energy transition has been so swift “it almost feels utopian​,”​ one Greek environmentalist said.​Mountainous ridgelines and arid islands ​are covered in wind turbines and solar panels​ that ​today provide nearly two-thirds of the nation’s electricity.​​​But ​now Greece​ is deliberately pivoting back toward fossil fuels, just not to burn at home. This time it’s betting that it can become one of Europe’s main suppliers of natural gas, with much of it shipped from the United States.Both Greek and European Union subsidies have funded new pipelines that crisscross the country and connect to a brand-new import terminal that will send gas to a broad swath of Central and Eastern Europe for decades to come.The investments in Greece are part of a deluge of investments into natural gas around the world, with significant consequences for climate change. In coming years, nearly a trillion and a half dollars will go into constructing pipelines and terminals, according to Global Energy Monitor. Twenty percent of that spending is in Europe.The world’s pivot to gas speaks to a kind of hedging that increasingly defines global climate negotiations: While nations have agreed on the necessity to transition away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible, almost all major economic powers are promoting gas as a “transition fuel.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Europe Banned Russia’s RT Network. Its Content Is Still Spreading.

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      A study found that hundreds of sites, many without obvious Kremlin links, copied Russian propaganda and spread it to unsuspecting audiences ahead of the E.U. election.The website calling itself Man Stuff News caters to a certain sensibility, with categories like “Backyard Grilling,” “TV Shows for Guys” and “Beard Grooming.” A recent article headlined “Tips for Dads During Labor” offered this nugget of advice: “Just remember to spend some time together before deciding whether or not to give birth.”Get to its section devoted to world news, however, and the nature of the coverage changes drastically. There, a recent article belittled an international warrant to arrest Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, for war crimes. It repeated, word for word, an article that had appeared a day before under a different byline on the website for RT, Russia’s global television network.RT, which the U.S. State Department describes as a key player in the Kremlin’s disinformation and propaganda apparatus, has been blocked in the European Union, Canada and other countries since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Sites like Man Stuff News, however, have helped RT sidestep the restrictions and continue reaching European and American audiences, according to a new report.Replicas of RT articles have been laundered thousands of times through hundreds of sites, according to the report, written by researchers from the German Marshall Fund, the University of Amsterdam and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research nonprofit. The sites include content aggregators like Infowars, run by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones; mirrors of RT repurposed from abandoned “zombie” sites; faux local news outlets with names like San Francisco Telegraph; and domains focusing on spirituality, yoga, extraterrestrials and the apocalypse. Many of the articles were then further disseminated through social media.The rationale for reposting RT content most likely varies from site to site, but the surreptitious republishing represents a particular danger in the European Union, where concerns about Kremlin-linked disinformation campaigns are intensifying, especially as Russia tries to weaken European support for Ukraine ahead of parliamentary elections next week.“This is really the tip of the Russian propaganda iceberg,” said Bret Schafer, a co-author of the report and a senior fellow at German Marshall. “It was quite evident when we were running the search results in the E.U. that if Russian propaganda is not showing up on Russian domains, it’s getting through, which is sort of a double whammy because it’s not just evading restrictions and bans, it’s doing so on sites that are less transparent than RT itself.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Venezuela, que estuvo abierta a unas elecciones limpias, da marcha atrás

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      Las autoridades rescindieron la invitación a los observadores de la Unión Europea para la votación presidencial de julio, en otra señal de que es poco probable que Nicolás Maduro ceda el poder.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Funcionarios venezolanos rescindieron una invitación a la Unión Europea para observar las próximas elecciones presidenciales del 28 de julio, otra clara señal de que es poco probable que el presidente Nicolás Maduro ceda el poder a pesar de permitir que un candidato de la oposición se presente contra él.Tras meses de intensificación de la represión por parte del gobierno de Maduro —que prohibió a aspirantes legítimos presentarse a las urnas, encarceló a opositores políticos y reprimió a la sociedad civil—, la autoridad electoral del país sorprendió a muchos en abril cuando permitió al exdiplomático Edmundo González inscribirse como candidato de la oposición.El gobierno venezolano se ha visto asfixiado por las sanciones impuestas por Estados Unidos y la Unión Europea a la vital industria petrolera del país, y algunos expertos afirman que Maduro permitió que González se presentara solo porque podría ayudarle a convencer a Washington y a sus aliados para que suavizaran las sanciones.El presidente del Consejo Nacional Electoral, Elvis Amoroso, dijo en una emisión televisada que estaba rescindiendo la invitación hasta que la UE levantara “las sanciones coercitivas, unilaterales y genocidas impuestas a nuestro pueblo”.“Sería inmoral permitir su participación conociendo sus prácticas neocolonialistas e intervencionistas contra Venezuela”, agregó.La UE dijo en un comunicado que “lamenta profundamente la decisión unilateral” del consejo electoral y pidió al gobierno que reconsidere su decisión.La economía de Venezuela implosionó hace casi una década, provocando uno de los mayores desplazamientos del mundo en la historia de América Latina: más de siete millones de venezolanos han abandonado el país, contribuyendo a una oleada migratoria hacia el norte que se ha convertido en un tema dominante en la campaña presidencial de EE. UU.Tres encuestas realizadas en el interior del país mostraron que la mayoría de los encuestados pensaba votar por González. Pero hay dudas generalizadas de que Maduro permita que se hagan públicos esos resultados, o que los acepte si se hacen públicos.Este año, el gobierno de Maduro ya ha detenido y encarcelado a 10 miembros de la oposición. Otros cinco tienen órdenes de arresto y están escondidos en la Embajada de Argentina en Caracas, la capital de Venezuela.Una propuesta en la legislatura también permitiría al gobierno suspender la campaña de la oposición en cualquier momento. Muchos venezolanos que viven en el extranjero no han podido registrarse para votar debido a los costosos y engorrosos requisitos.Maduro, de 61 años, es el heredero político del movimiento socialista de Hugo Chávez en Venezuela, y ha consolidado el poder desde que ganó el cargo por primera vez en 2013. Controla funcionalmente el poder legislativo, el ejército, la policía, el sistema judicial, el consejo electoral, el presupuesto del país y gran parte de los medios de comunicación, así como las violentas bandas paramilitares llamadas colectivos.Él y su círculo íntimo también han sido acusados de abusos sistemáticos contra los derechos humanos que constituyen crímenes de lesa humanidad, incluidos homicidios, tortura y violencia sexual. More