Diamonds are the ultimate status symbol, but are they really forever?
For over five centuries, Antwerp’s diamond district in Belgium has been the cornerstone of the global diamond trade, through which 80% of the world’s rough diamonds have passed. Now, that legacy is under strain in ways the city — and the industry itself — has never seen.
Phil Hoymans, managing director of Bonas, one of the companies that helps run Antwerp’s diamond auctions, said people aren’t aware of what’s happening to the $60-billion-a-year diamond industry.
“Antwerp trades products that come directly from the mine,” Hoymans said
Mines in places like Botswana and Canada send their uncut gems to Antwerp to be traded around the world.
“It kind of works like a Swiss watch,” Hoymans said. “We’re operating here in a square mile where [there are] 1,200, 1,300 diamond companies – many, many different communities and nationalities of people working here.
Ravi Bhansali, the managing director of Rosy Blue, one of the world’s largest diamond companies, is part of a family that’s been in the trade for generations.
“My grandfather would cut and polish diamonds, and his nephew used to sell them, and that was the whole company. So from that to going to today, where we’re about four thousand employees, it’s a beautiful story behind there,” Bhansali said.
Challenges facing the diamond industry
Today, Antwerp now confronts challenges on multiple fronts.
First, “blood diamonds.”
For years, the industry was plagued with exploitation in developing countries — a history that has led to some of the strictest oversight requirements in the global luxury market today.
Second, geopolitics.
For decades, a significant share of the world’s rough diamonds flowed into Antwerp from Russia. That ended abruptly with sanctions imposed after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“That’s about three billion dollars of Russian diamonds that stopped flowing through here,” Bhansali said.
Then came tariffs.
“If they have been cut and polished in India, it’s Indian American tariffs that we have to pay, which are at fifty percent at the moment,” Bhansali said.
And then there’s the fastest-moving challenge of all: Lab-grown diamonds.
Once a novelty, now mass-produced, chemically identical and indistinguishable to the naked eye. Bhansali has to scan all of his diamonds — millions per year — to make sure no lab-growns have been snuck in the mix.
If you can’t tell the difference, then why would customers pay the markup for a real gem?
“That same statement can be said for any good counterfeit,” Bhansali said. “This is a finite resource. And I think that forever story holds a special power over something that was grown two weeks ago in a factory in China and cut and polished.”
Plus, there’s another challenge to the industry: marriage rates are declining worldwide. Fewer engagements mean fewer engagement rings.
Fortunately, Jennifer Elliot, the owner of the boutique Elliot & Ostrich, says there’s also a new market: a divorce ring. It’s a piece of jewelry created from a ring from a past marriage, taking the original stone and redesigning it into a new setting that expresses the new you.
Antwerp is evolving. And the rest of the jewelry box of a city isn’t ready to call it quits, wagering that some things are still worth taking their time, and come out stronger under pressure.
” I have no doubt in my mind that we will have an industry here tomorrow,” Bhansali said. “Did you know that the youngest diamonds are a billion years old? The youngest diamonds. So that predates trees on planet Earth. How many things do you carry or hold in your home or wear on your body can you say the same thing for?”
PARIS, Dec 19 (Reuters) – French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday it was too early to say whether a one-month delay to decide on an EU trade deal with South America’s Mercosur bloc will be enough to meet the conditions set by France, but that he hoped so.
Macron, who has pushed for stronger guarantees to protect farmers, said he hoped the EU and Mercosur nations will approve in January measures to ensure South American imports meet the same requirements than European ones.
That would make the pact a “new” Mercosur-EU deal, he said.
BRUSSELS, Dec 19 (Reuters) – European Union leaders could agree to borrow on the market, against the security of the EU budget, to keep Ukraine financed in 2026 and 2027, a draft text of the leaders’ conclusions seen by Reuters showed on Friday.
But the leaders still want their governments and the European Parliament to continue working on setting up financing for Ukraine based on frozen Russian assets, the draft text said.
The joint borrowing against the EU budget would be with the exclusion of Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, said the draft, which has yet to be approved by the leaders.
WARSAW, Dec 18 (Reuters) – European Union leaders agree that it would be fair to use Russian assets to finance Ukraine, but there are many technical points that need to be ironed out, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Thursday.
“We have definitely made a breakthrough, everyone agrees that it is worth negotiating and it would be fair to use Russian assets, but some countries will fight until the end to maximize their guarantees,” he told reporters in Brussels.
(Reporting by Alan Charlish and Pawel Florkiewicz, writing by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk)
Dec 11 (Reuters) – Polish Justice Minister Waldemar Zurek accused Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Thursday of being closer to Russia than Europe, renewing an argument between the two European Union members that Budapest has called an unjustified provocation.
Zurek expressed frustration with Budapest in an interview with Reuters when asked about two former Polish officials charged with misuse of funds who are being shielded by fellow-EU member Hungary.
He referred to the case, as well as Orban’s talks with President Vladimir Putin and Hungary blocking funds for Poland for supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russian invasion.
“It looks to me today as if Hungary’s leadership is closer to the leadership in Moscow than the EU leadership, and I say this with great sadness and also with great concern,” Zurek said.
“Orban, unfortunately, wants to blow up the EU from within and his pro-Russian policies are completely unacceptable to the majority of citizens in the EU.”
Orban has accused Poland of making unjust and provocative remarks about its ties with Moscow, which he argues are in Hungary’s national interest. He says European Union sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine are self-defeating.
Former Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, who faces 26 charges including leading an organised criminal group, is in Hungary and may seek asylum there, following the example of his former deputy Marcin Romanowski, who faces similar charges.
Both men say they will not return to Poland because they would not get a fair trial under Tusk’s government, which rejects the charges, emphasising that its justice system is independent.
Orban met Ziobro in Budapest in October and accused Warsaw of a “political witch hunt”.
A Polish court will decide in the coming weeks whether to issue a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) for Ziobro.
“When you have EAW, it’s an agreement between all EU countries that we respect and have confidence in our own national justice systems… Today we have a situation where Hungary says ‘we are granting asylum to Mr. Romanowski’, which in my opinion is violating this EU agreement,” Zurek said.
“It seems that the subsequent issue will be to examine the actions of the Hungarian state. And perhaps Poland will be forced to expose this abnormal situation on the European forum, where Hungary is breaking the rules of the EAW by granting asylum.”
(Reporting by Anna Koper, Anna Włodarczak-Semczuk, Justyna Pawlak and Kuba Stezycki; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
Ron Curtis, an English professor in Montreal, lived for 40 years with a degenerative spinal disease, in what he called the “black hole” of chronic pain.
On a July day in 2022, Mr. Curtis, 64, ate a last bowl of vegetable soup made by his wife, Lori, and, with the help of a palliative care doctor, died in his bedroom overlooking a lake.
Aron Wade, a successful 54-year-old stage and television actor in Belgium, decided he could no longer tolerate life with the depression that haunted him for three decades.
Last year, after a panel of medical experts found he had “unbearable mental suffering,” a doctor came to his home and gave him medicine to stop his heart, with his partner and two best friends at his side.
Argemiro Ariza was in his early 80s when he began to lose function in his limbs, no longer able to care for his wife, who had dementia, in their home in Bogotá.
Doctors diagnosed A.L.S., and he told his daughter Olga that he wanted to die while he still had dignity. His children threw him a party with a mariachi band and lifted him from his wheelchair to dance. A few days later, he admitted himself to a hospital, and a doctor administered a drug that ended his life.
Until recently, each of these deaths would have been considered a murder. But a monumental change is underway around the world. From liberal European countries to conservative Latin American ones, a new way of thinking about death is starting to take hold.
Stephanie Nolen is exploring access, attitudes and approaches to medically assisted death around the world.
Over the past five years, the practice of allowing a physician to help severely ill patients end their lives with medication has been legalized in nine countries on three continents. Courts or legislatures, or both, are considering legalization in a half-dozen more, including South Korea and South Africa, as well as eight of the 31 American states where it remains prohibited.
It is a last frontier in the expansion of individual autonomy. More people are seeking to define the terms of their deaths in the same way they have other aspects of their lives, such as marriage and childbearing. This is true even in Latin America, where conservative institutions such as the Roman Catholic church are still powerful.
“We believe in the priority of our control over our bodies, and as a heterogeneous culture, we believe in choices: If your choice does not affect me, go ahead,” said Dr. Julieta Moreno Molina, a bioethicist who has advised Colombia’s Ministry of Health on its assisted dying regulations.
Yet, as assisted death gains more acceptance, there are major unresolved questions about who should be eligible. While most countries begin with assisted death for terminal illness, which has the most public support, this is often followed quickly by a push for wider access. With that push comes often bitter public debate.
Should someone with intractable depression be allowed an assisted death?
European countries and Colombia all permit people with irremediable suffering from conditions such as depression or schizophrenia to seek an assisted death. But in Canada, the issue has become contentious. Assisted death for people who do not have a reasonably foreseeable natural death was legalized in 2021, but the government has repeatedly excluded people with mental illness. Two of them are challenging the exclusion in court on the grounds that it violates their constitutional rights.
In public debate, supporters of the right to assisted death for these patients say that people who have lived with severe depression for years, and have tried a variety of therapies and medications, should be allowed to decide when they are no longer willing to keep pursuing treatments. Opponents, concerned that mental illness can involve a pathological wish to die, say it can be difficult to predict the potential effectiveness of treatments. And, they argue, people who struggle to get help from an overburdened public health service may simply give up and choose to die, though their conditions might have been improved.
Should a child with an incurable condition be able to choose assisted death?
The ability to consent is a core consideration in requesting assisted death. Only a handful of countries are willing to extend that right to minors. Even in the places that do, there are just a few assisted deaths for children each year, almost always children with cancer.
In Colombia and the Netherlands, children over 12 can request assisted death on their own. Parents can provide consent for children 11 and younger.
Denise de Ruijter took comfort in her Barbie dolls when she struggled to connect with people. She was diagnosed with autism and had episodes of depression and psychosis. As a teenager in a Dutch town, she craved the life her schoolmates had — nights out, boyfriends — but couldn’t manage it.
She attempted suicide several times before applying for an assisted death at 18. Evaluators required her to try three years of additional therapies before agreeing her suffering was unbearable. She died in 2021, with her family and Barbies nearby.
The issue is under renewed scrutiny in the Netherlands, where, over the past decade, a growing number of adolescents have applied for assisted death for relief from irremediable psychiatric suffering from conditions such as eating disorders and anxiety.
Most such applications by teens are either withdrawn by the patient, or rejected by assessors, but public concern over a few high-profile cases of teens who received assisted deaths prompted the country’s regulator to consider a moratorium on approvals for children applying on the basis of psychiatric suffering.
Should someone with dementia be allowed assisted death?
Many people dread the idea of losing their cognitive abilities and their autonomy, and hope to have an assisted death when they reach that point. But this is a more complex situation to regulate than for a person who can still make a clear request.
How can a person who is losing their mental capacity consent to dying? Most governments, and doctors, are too uncomfortable to permit it, even though the idea tends to be popular in countries with aging populations.
In Colombia, Spain, Ecuador and the Canadian province of Quebec, people who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or other kinds of cognitive decline can request assessment for an assisted death before they lose mental capacity, sign an advance request — and then have a physician end their life after they have lost the ability to consent themselves.
But that raises a separate, challenging, question: After people lose the capacity to request an assisted death, who should decide it’s time?
Their spouses? Their children? Their doctors? The government? Colombia entrusts families with this role. The Netherlands leaves it up to doctors — but many refuse to do it, unwilling to administer lethal drugs to a patient who can’t clearly articulate a rational wish to die.
Jan Grijpma was always clear with his daughter, Maria: When his mind went, he didn’t want to live any more. Maria worked with his longtime family doctor, in Amsterdam, to identify the point when Mr. Grijpma, 90 and living in a nursing home, was losing his ability to consent himself.
When it seemed close, in 2023, they booked the day, and he updated his day planner: Thursday, visit the vicar; Friday, bicycle with physiotherapy and get a haircut; Sunday, pancakes with Maria; Monday, euthanasia.
All of these questions are becoming part of the discussion as the right to control and plan one’s own death is pushed in front of reluctant legislatures and uneasy medical professionals.
Dr. Madeline Li, a Toronto psychiatrist, was given the task of developing the assisted-dying practice in one of Canada’s largest hospitals when the procedure was first decriminalized in 2015. She began with assessing patients for eligibility and then moved to providing medical assistance in dying, or MAID, as it is called in Canada. For some patients with terminal cancer, it felt like the best form of care she could offer, she said.
But then Canada’s eligibility criteria expanded, and Dr. Li found herself confronting a different kind of patient.
“To provide assisted dying to somebody dying of a condition who is not happy with how they’re going to die, I’m willing to assist them, and hasten that death,” she said. “I struggle more with people who aren’t dying and want MAID — I think then you’re assisting suicide. If you’re not dying — if I didn’t give you MAID, you wouldn’t otherwise die — then you’re a person who’s not unhappy with how you’re going to die. You’re unhappy with how you’re living.”
Who has broken the taboo?
For decades, Switzerland was the only country to permit assisted death; assisted suicide was legalized there in 1942. It took a further half century for a few more countries to loosen their laws. Now decriminalization of some form of assisted death has occurred across Europe.
But there has recently been a wave of legalization in Latin America, where Colombia was long an outlier, having allowed legal assisted dying since 2015.
Paola Roldán Espinosa had a thriving career in business in Ecuador, and a toddler, when she was diagnosed with A.L.S. in 2023. Her health soon deteriorated to the point that she needed a ventilator.
She wanted to die on her terms — and took the case to the country’s highest court. In February 2024, the court responded to her petition by decriminalizing assisted dying. Ms. Roldán, then 42, had the death she sought, with her family around her, a month later.
Ecuador has decriminalized assisted dying through constitutional court cases, and Peru’s Supreme Court has permitted individual exceptions to the law which prohibits the procedure, opening the door to expansion. Cuba’s national assembly legalized assisted dying in 2023, although no regulations on how the procedure will work are yet in place. In October, Uruguay’s parliament passed a long-debated law allowing assisted death for the terminally ill.
The first country in Asia to take steps toward legalization is South Korea, where a bill to decriminalize assisted death has been proposed at the National Assembly several times but has not come to a vote. At the same time, the Constitutional Court, which for years refused to hear cases on the subject, has agreed to adjudicate a petition from a disabled man with severe and chronic pain who seeks an assisted death.
Access in the United States remains limited: 11 jurisdictions (10 states plus the District of Columbia) allow assisted suicide or physician-assisted death, for patients who have a terminal diagnosis, and in some cases, only for patients who are already in hospice care. It will become legal in Delaware on Jan. 1, 2026.
In Slovenia, in 2024, 55 percent of the population who voted in a national referendum were in favor of legalizing assisted death, and parliament duly passed a law in July. But pushback from right-wing politicians then forced a new referendum, and in late November, 54 percent of those who voted rejected the legalization.
And in the United Kingdom, a bill to legalize assisted death for people with terminal illness has made its way slowly through parliament. It has faced fierce opposition from a coalition of more than 60 groups for people with disabilities, who argue they may face subtle coercion to end their lives rather than drain their families or the state of resources for their care.
Why now?
In many countries, decriminalization of assisted dying has followed the expansion of rights for personal choice in other areas, such as the removal of restrictions on same-sex marriage, abortion and sometimes drug use.
“I would expect it to be on the agenda in every liberal democracy,” said Wayne Sumner, a medical ethicist at the University of Toronto who studies the evolution of norms and regulations around assisted dying. “They’ll come to it at their own speed, but it follows with these other policies.”
The change is also being driven by a convergence of political, demographic and cultural trends.
As populations age, and access to health care improves, more people are living longer. Older populations mean more chronic disease, and more people living with compromised health. And they are thinking about death, and what they will — and won’t — be willing to tolerate in the last years of their lives.
At the same time, there is diminishing tolerance for suffering that is perceived as unnecessary.
“Until very recently, we were a society where few people lived past 60 — and now suddenly we live much longer,” said Lina Paola Lara Negrette, a psychologist who until October was the director of the Dying With Dignity Foundation in Colombia. “Now people here need to think about the system, and the services that are available, and what they will want.”
Changes in family structures and communities, particularly in rapidly urbanizing middle-income countries, mean that traditional networks of care are less strong, which shifts how people can imagine living in older age or with chronic illness, she added.
“When you had many siblings and a lot of generations under one roof, the question of care was a family thing,” she said. “That has changed. And it shapes how we think about living, and dying.”
How does assisted dying work?
Beyond the ethical dilemmas, actually carrying out legalized assisted deaths involves countless choices for countries. Spain requires a waiting period of at least 15 days between a patient’s assessments (but the average wait in practice is 75 days). In most other places, the prescribed wait is less than two weeks for patients with terminal conditions, but often longer in practice, said Katrine Del Villar, a professor of constitutional law at the Queensland University of Technology who tracks trends in assisted dying
Most countries allow patients to choose between administering the drugs themselves or having a health care provider do it. When both options are available, the overwhelming majority of people choose to have a health care provider end their life with an injection that stops their heart.
In many countries only a doctor can administer the drugs, but Canada and New Zealand permit nurse practitioners to provide medically assisted deaths too.
One Australian state prohibits medical professionals from raising the topic of assisted death. A patient must ask about it first.
Who determines eligibility is another issue. In the Netherlands, two physicians assess a patient; in Colombia, it’s a panel consisting of a medical specialist, a psychologist and a lawyer. The draft legislation in Britain would require both a panel and two independent physicians.
Switzerland and the states of Oregon and Vermont are the only jurisdictions in the world that explicitly allow people who are not residents access to assisted deaths.
Most countries permit medical professionals to conscientiously object to providing assisted deaths and allow faith-based medical institutions to refuse to participate. In Canada, individual professionals have the right to refuse, but a court challenge is underway seeking to end the ability of hospitals that are controlled by faith-based organizations and that operate with public funds to refuse to allow assisted deaths on their premises.
“Even when assisted dying has been legal and available somewhere for a long time, there can be a gap between what is legal and what is acceptable — what most physicians and patients and families feel comfortable with,” said Dr. Sisco van Veen, an ethicist and psychiatrist at Amsterdam Medical University. “And this isn’t static. It evolves over time.”
Jin Yu Young in Seoul, José Bautista in Madrid, José María León Cabrera in Quito, Veerle Schyns in Amsterdam and Koba Ryckewaert in Brussels contributed reporting.
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Brussels Airport will cancel 110 of the 203 incoming flights on Wednesday, in addition to the departing flights already scrapped due to a nationwide strike, a spokesperson said, confirming a report by Belgian broadcaster VRT.
He added that it will be up to the airlines to reroute the cancelled flights and that no cancellations are currently expected among the remaining 93 incoming flights.
Part of the airport’s security and ground-handling staff will take part in the strike, which is being held in protest at the government’s austerity plans.
(Reporting by Charlotte Van Campenhout, Editing by Kirsten Donovan)
Has the West absorbed the right lessons from Ukraine’s war with Russia? For the unsettling answer, look at what’s buzzing mysteriously in the skies above Europe’s cities. Drones were spotted this month in France, loitering around a gunpowder plant and a train station where tanks are located. Others were seen recently near a Belgian military base, a port, and a nuclear power plant.
Belgium’s defense minister told the press the drones near military bases were “definitely for spying.” The provenance of other suspicious drones is less clear. Yet whatever their source, they’re a security threat. The Netherlands suspended flights in Eindhoven Saturday after a drone sighting, and similar episodes have unfolded this month at airports in Sweden, Germany, Belgium and Denmark.
Ten years or so between installments of a successful Hollywood franchise is a lifetime. When it comes to the third “Now You See Me” movie — poof! — time doesn’t matter. These magicians still got it.
“Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” does what sequels apparently must do these days — load up the characters, return to favorite bits and go global — but nails the trick, a crowd-pleasing return that already has a fourth in the works.
“It is very good to be back,” says Jesse Eisenberg as the egotistical, perfectionist J. Daniel Atlas, the brains behind the magician-robber outfit. It’s hard to argue with that sentiment on the strength of this outing, directed with assurance by Ruben Fleischer.
“Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” acts as a sort of pivot, bringing back the veterans — all of them, in various forms — as well as introducing three Gen Z eat-the-rich magicians played by Dominic Sessa, Justice Smith and Ariana Greenblatt. They’re clearly the future. It’s in good (sleight of) hands.
The movie starts off with a clever rip-off of nasty crypto bros in Brooklyn and expands to scenes in Belgium, the United Arab Emirates, France and South Africa. It’s got Nazis, “Harry Potter” vibes and some Louvre museum heist energy. We didn’t need the F1 chase through Abu Dhabi, but no one’s complaining.
The original Four Horsemen — Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco and Isla Fisher — are supplemented by Lizzy Caplan, who had replaced Fisher in the second installment. Morgan Freeman returns as the gravel-voiced mentor.
Rosamund Pike in “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t.” (Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate via AP)
Rosamund Pike in “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t.” (Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate via AP)
The prize at the movie’s heart is a diamond — but no mere bauble. It’s the Heart Diamond, the largest ever discovered, with a price tag of half a billion dollars. It’s the size of a smoked turkey leg.
The diamond is owned by a particularly vile South African diamond mine scion who uses her ultra-wealth to launder money for warlords and arms dealers. She is played deliciously by Rosamund Pike with a snide disdain and a nifty Afrikaner accent.
The secretive magic society known as The Eye unites the old Horsemen and the new trio (the Three Ponies?) to steal the diamond, stored in one of those multilevel, biometric “Mission: Impossible”-style bunkers.
Capturing it won’t enhance their bank statements. Remember, they’re all really anti-capitalist, share-the-wealth magicians — most likely democratic socialists, in vogue right now. “This is a chance to drive a stake through the devil herself,” Eisenberg’s character says.
Hollywood is funny that way, creating a multimillion-dollar franchise on the back of heroic left-wing activist characters and convincing the UAE to set it on their streets.
Dominic Sessa, Justice Smith and Ariana Greenblatt in “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t.” (Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate via AP)
Dominic Sessa, Justice Smith and Ariana Greenblatt in “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t.” (Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate via AP)
At first, it’s hard, with eight heroes rushing around, to figure out the primary dynamics. The older Horsemen are strangely muted here — except for Caplan, a hoot — and the young need some seasoning. Intergenerational bickering keeps the movie alive.
There’s a quick stop at a French chateau where some real magic takes place, literally. The last two “Now You See Me” installments got very green-screen and CGI when it came to effects, but the third very refreshingly steps back into old-fashioned trickery. In a single take, we see each of the heroes try to top the others with a card trick, misdirection or illusion.
There’s also a hall of mirrors, an upside-down room, an infinity staircase, a perspective-warping room and a nifty escape from a chamber filling with sand. Kudos to the filmmakers for embracing physical tricks over digital trickery. Also, cute use of Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra.”
All this leads to a huge showdown between the diamond princess and our motley magicians. You won’t guess who’s been pulling the strings all this time. Seriously, you won’t. And a new generation of magician-thieves are minted. That was a hard trick to pull off.
“Now You See Me: Now You Don’t,” a Lionsgate release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for some strong language, violence and suggestive references. Running time: 112 minutes. Three stars out of four.
BRUSSELS—The European Union is racing against the clock to overcome Belgium’s objections to a plan to fund Ukraine’s defense using Russian money.
Ukraine is on course to run out of cash in the spring, EU officials say, and they see
their loan proposal as the best option for allowing Kyiv to continue buying weapons. The plan would lend as much as 183 billion euros (about $213 billion) to Ukraine, backed by Russian financial assets that are immobilized in Belgium.
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -EU member states have three options to fund Ukraine’s financing needs, with a reparations loan based on immobilised Russian assets as the most effective option, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Thursday.
Other options are for the EU to use “headroom” in its budget to raise capital, or for an agreement among member states to raise capital by themselves, she said in a speech in European Parliament.
“Option three is to have a reparations loan based on immobilised Russian assets. We give a loan to Ukraine – that Ukraine pays back if Russia pays reparations,” she said.
“This is the most effective way to sustain Ukraine’s defence and its economy.”
(Reporting by Bart Meijer and Lili Bayer, Editing by Charlotte Van Campenhout)
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Belgium’s Liege airport temporarily halted flights due to drone sighting, the second such incident this week, national news agency Belga said on Friday citing the skeyes air traffic control service.
Drones spotted flying over airports in the capital Brussels and in Liege, in the country’s east, forced on Tuesday the diversion of many incoming planes and the grounding of some due to depart.
Sightings of drones over airports and military bases have become a constant in Belgium in recent days, and have caused major disruptions across Europe in recent months.
They have forced temporary closures of airports in several countries including Sweden on Thursday. Some officials have blamed the incidents on “hybrid warfare” by Russia. Moscow has denied any connection with the incidents.
The Belgian government called an emergency meeting of key government ministers and security chiefs on Thursday to address what the defence minister called a coordinated attack
(Reporting by Alessandro Parodi, editing by Benoit Van Overstraeten)
(Reuters) -Flights bound for Brussels Airport were held or diverted late Thursday, according to flight tracking site Flightradar24, which cited unconfirmed reports of renewed drone sightings.
Reuters has not independently verified the drone reports.
Belgium had called an emergency meeting of key government ministers and security chiefs for Thursday after drone sightings forced closures of airports and a military air base on Tuesday evening in what the defence minister called a coordinated attack.
(Reporting by Anusha Shah in Bengaluru, Editing by Franklin Paul)
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -EU countries on Thursday formally adopted a 19th package of sanctions against Russia for its war against Ukraine that includes a ban on Russian liquefied natural gas imports.
The 27 member states had already approved the package on Wednesday evening after Slovakia dropped its block.
“It’s a significant package that targets main Russian revenue streams through new energy, financial, and trade measures,” the Danish rotating presidency of the EU said.
The LNG ban will take effect in two stages: short-term contracts will end after six months and long-term contracts from January 1, 2027. The full ban comes a year earlier than the Commission’s roadmap to end the bloc’s reliance on Russian fossil fuels.
Measures in the package also include a new mechanism to limit the movement of Russian diplomats within the EU, the statement said.
“It targets Russian banks, crypto exchanges, entities in India and China, among others,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said in a post on X.
“The EU is curbing Russian diplomats’ movements to counter the attempts of destabilisation. It is increasingly harder for Putin to fund this war.”
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said the ban on LNG imports is an important step towards a complete phasing out of Russian energy in the EU.
(Reporting by Kate Abnett, Alessandro Parodi and Julia Payne, editing by Bart Meijer)
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Some U.S.-funded contraceptives worth nearly $4 million that are intended for poor nations but stuck in a Belgian warehouse since President Donald Trump froze foreign aid in January risk becoming unusable by the middle of next year, a reproductive rights group said on Thursday.
Diplomatic talks to try to resolve a stalemate between Belgium and the United States on the issue are on hold because of the Washington government shutdown, a Flemish government spokesperson said.
Reuters in July quoted sources as saying the supplies valued at $9.7 million in total would be burned after Washington rejected offers from the United Nations and family planning organisations to buy or ship them to poorer nations. A U.S. State Department spokesperson later confirmed a decision had been taken to destroy them.
No one from the U.S. government was immediately available to comment on Thursday.
Belgian regulations ban the destruction of usable medical supplies without special approval and a fee, so they remain in a warehouse in Geel in the province of Antwerp.
According to the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the supplies are mostly intended for Tanzania, which has a minimum shelf life requirement for medical imports.
Expiry dates on around a million vials of injectables and over 400,000 implants, together valued at $3.97 million, mean they will no longer comply with Tanzanian import standards by the end of this year and the middle of next year, Marcel Van Valen, Head of Supply Chain at IPPF, told Reuters.
The Tanzanian government did not immediately reply to questions asking if it would grant an exemption.
The supplies expire between April 2027 and September 2031, according to an internal document listing the warehouse stocks and verified by three sources.
In Tanzania “any device with (a) shelf life of more than 24 months whose remaining shelf life is less than 60%” will not be permitted for import, according to government regulations.
All the supplies mentioned in the internal document have a shelf life of over 24 months.
Beth Schlachter, MSI Reproductive Choices’ Senior Director of U.S. External Relations, told Reuters the U.S. refusal to redistribute the supplies would have a severe impact.
“The consequences of this callous act will be far-reaching, higher rates of unsafe abortion, more girls dropping out of school and more women dying. It is callous, costly and cruel.”
(Reporting by Ammu Kannampilly, Charlotte Van Campenhout, Editing by Barbara Lewis)
A feature of the Trump era is that while foreign governments object to the American President’s protectionism, in practice they often jump at the opportunity to join him in imposing tariffs. Witness the new levies the European Union proposed on imported steel last week.
Brussels plans to cut in half the volume of steel allowed to enter the EU tariff-free each year, to 18.3 million tons. For imports above that level, the tariff rate will rise to 50% from 25%. This is a gift to struggling European steel makers that have long begged for protection.
By Marwa Rashad, Kate Abnett and Nerijus Adomaitis
(Reuters) -European nations, including France, are among the staunchest supporters of Ukraine in its fight against Russia. Several have also stepped up their imports of Russian energy which pump billions of euros into Moscow’s wartime economy.
Well into the fourth year of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the European Union remains in the precarious position of financing both sides in the conflict. Its large deliveries of military and humanitarian aid to Kyiv are countered by commercial payments to Moscow for oil and gas.
The bloc has reduced its reliance on once-dominant supplier Russia by roughly 90% since 2022. It nonetheless imported more than 11 billion euros of Russian energy in the first eight months of this year, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), an independent research organization based in Helsinki.
Seven of the EU’s 27 member countries increased the value of their imports versus a year earlier, including five countries that support Ukraine in the war. France, for example, saw purchases of Russian energy rise 40% to 2.2 billion euros while the Netherlands jumped 72% to 498 million euros, the analysis shows.
While LNG ports in countries like France and Spain serve as entry points for Russian supplies into Europe, the gas is often not consumed in those countries but instead sent onwards to buyers across the bloc.
Vaibhav Raghunandan, EU-Russia specialist at CREA, described increased flows as “a form of self-sabotage” by some countries, given energy sales are the biggest source of revenue for Russia as it wages war against an European-backed Ukraine.
“The Kremlin is quite literally getting funding to continue to deploy their armed forces in Ukraine,” he said.
TRUMP SLAMMED EUROPE’S LEADERS
EU energy payments to Moscow have come under renewed scrutiny after U.S. President Donald Trump dressed down European leaders in his speech to the U.N General Assembly last month, demanding they cease all such purchases immediately.
“Europe has to step it up,” Trump said. “They can’t be doing what they’re doing. They’re buying oil and gas from Russia while they’re fighting Russia. It’s embarrassing to them, and it was very embarrassing to them when I found out about it.”
The French energy ministry told Reuters that France’s value of Russian energy imports rose this year as it served customers in other countries, without naming countries or companies. Gas market data suggest part of France’s Russian imports are sent onwards to Germany, according to Kpler analysts.
The Dutch government said while it supported EU plans to phase out Russian energy, until these proposals are fixed into EU law, it was powerless to block existing contracts between European energy companies and Russian suppliers.
The EU, which has already barred most purchases of Russian crude oil and fuel, has announced plans to speed up a ban on Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) to 2027, from 2028. LNG now represents the biggest EU import of Russian energy, accounting for almost half the value of total purchases, the data shows.
The European Commission declined to comment on the 2025 imports data. The bloc’s energy chief said last month the phased retreat from Russian fossil fuels was designed to ensure member countries don’t face energy price spikes or supply shortages.
The proposals, which envisage a total ban on all Russian oil and gas from 2028, mean European cash could be supporting the Kremlin’s war effort for a year or more to come.
Trump says U.S. oil and gas could replace lost Russian supplies, and many analysts say such a switch is possible, though it would boost Europe’s dependency on U.S. energy in an era when Washington is using tariffs as a policy tool.
“The EU has agreed to buy more energy from the U.S to accommodate the very strong U.S. demands to stop Russian imports,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “However, it is an illusion to think that U.S. LNG would replace Russian LNG on a one-to-one basis. U.S. LNG is in the hands of private companies, which do not obey orders from the White House and the European Commission, they optimize their portfolios.”
HUNGARY, BELGIUM AND OTHERS SEE BILLS RISE
The EU has come a long way since 2021.
In that year, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the bloc imported more than 133 billion euros of Russian energy, according to CREA data.
In January-August this year, the EU’s bill amounted to 11.4 billion euros – a fraction of per-war levels and a decline of 21% from the same period of 2024, the figures show.
Hungary and Slovakia – which maintain close ties with the Kremlin and reject any notion of renouncing Russian gas – remain major importers, together accounting for 5 billion euros of that total. They wouldn’t be affected by the planned EU sanctions on LNG, which requires the unanimous backing of member states, as they could still receive Russian pipeline gas until 2028.
Hungary was among the seven countries to see the value of Russian energy imports rise this year, by 11%, according to the data. France and the Netherlands are joined by four other countries whose governments support Ukraine in the war: Belgium, which saw a 3% increase, Croatia (55%), Romania (57%) and Portugal (167%).
Belgium’s energy ministry said the country’s increase was down to separate EU sanctions that took effect in March and banned “transshipments”, or re-exporting, of Russian LNG to outside the bloc, meaning arriving LNG had to be unloaded in Belgium – a global hub – rather than being transferred from ship to ship to be transported onwards to a final destination.
Portugal’s energy ministry said the country only imported modest amounts of Russian gas and that flows over the course of the year would be lower than 2024. The Croatian and Romanian governments didn’t respond to requests for comment on the data.
The European Union’s total imports of Russian energy since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, have amounted to more than 213 billion euros, the CREA data shows.
That dwarfs the amount the EU has spent on aid to Ukraine in the same period, even though it has been the country’s biggest benefactor: the bloc has allocated 167 billion euros of financial, military and humanitarian assistance to Kyiv, according to the Kiel Institute, a German economic think-tank.
ENERGY FIRMS STICK TO LONG-TERM CONTRACTS
France’s TotalEnergies is among the biggest importers of Russian LNG into Europe, with other major players including Shell, Spain’s Naturgy, Germany’s SEFE, and trading house Gunvor. They all operate long-term contracts that last into the 2030s or 2040s.
TotalEnergies told Reuters it was continuing deliveries from Russia’s Yamal plant under contracts that could not be suspended without official EU sanctions in place. The company will maintain supplies as long as European governments deem Russian gas necessary for energy security, it added.
Shell, Naturgy and Gunvor declined to comment on Russian imports.
Ronald Pinto, gas research principal analyst at Kpler said companies were reluctant to risk incurring fines from breaching contractual commitments without the solid legal cover of an EU ban on Russian LNG.
“In the end, market players are buying this LNG, not countries, and for the most part, they are sticking to their long-term contracts,” he added.
Pinto said flow dynamics studies suggested French imports of Russian LNG often flowed via pipeline to Belgium to then reach Germany, where there’s strong demand from industrial users. He cautioned it was “impossible to track exactly the movement of gas molecules within the European gas grid”.
A spokesperson for SEFE, which operates 10% of Germany’s gas transmission network, confirmed that the company imports Russian gas via France and Belgium.
The German economy ministry told Reuters that it welcomed EU efforts to phase out imports of Russian fossil fuels, but that SEFE was bound by a long-standing contract to buy LNG from Russia’s Yamal plant with no option to terminate the agreement.
“Under the contract’s take-or-pay terms, SEFE would have to pay for the agreed quantities, even if no delivery was taken,” a ministry spokesperson said. “Non-acceptance would enable Yamal to resell these quantities, which would then provide double support to the Russian economy.”
(Reporting by Marwa Rashad in London, Kate Abnett in Brussels and Nerijus Adomaitis in Oslo; Additional reporting by America Hernandez in Paris, Francesca Landini in Milan, Christoph Steitz and Vera Eckert in Frankfurt, Shadia Nasralla in London, Pietro Lombardi in Madrid and Andrey Khalip in Lisbon; Editing by Dmitry Zhdannikov and Pravin Char)
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen comfortably survived two bids to remove her when the European Parliament rejected no-confidence motions from hard-right and left groups on Thursday.
EU lawmakers rejected the two motions of censure with 378 members of the 720-strong parliament expressing support for von der Leyen in the first vote and 383 in the second.
Von der Leyen said in a post on X that she deeply appreciated the support and that her team of commissioners would work closely with the parliament to tackle Europe’s challenges.
The results were slightly better for the EU executive chief than in July, when 360 lawmakers voted against a motion brought by mainly far-right lawmakers, although below the 401 votes for von der Leyen’s re-election for a second term in July 2024.
Although the motions of censure had almost no chance of reaching the two-thirds majority required to unseat von der Leyen, some lawmakers said they could expose more general disquiet over her leadership and destabilise the EU assembly, whose backing is required to pass legislation.
Parties outside the mainstream have realised that previously seldom-used censure motions are easy to trigger after the 2024 elections swelled the far right to more than 100 lawmakers, with only 72 required to back one.
Both censure motions criticised von der Leyen for accepting an unbalanced tariff deal with the United States and proposing a trade agreement with South American bloc Mercosur, which critics say threatens farmers and the environment.
The U.S. and Mercosur deals will be put to votes in the European Parliament in the coming months, with the outcomes unclear.
(Reporting by Inti Landauro and Philip Blenkinsop, editing by Bart Meijer and Ros Russell)
ATHENS (Reuters) -Europe is losing an estimated 50 billion euros ($58 billion) a year from tax and customs fraud, which are now the most attractive criminal activities in the bloc, and more needs to be done to fight the gangs responsible, the EU’s top prosecutor said.
Laura Codruta Kovesi was speaking on Thursday at Piraeus port in Athens, where The European Public Prosecutor’s Office has been carrying out a major probe.
“We want to send the criminals behind this massive fraud a strong message: the rules of the game have changed, no more safe havens for you!” Kovesi told reporters at Piraeus. “We have to fight back. As Europeans.”
EPPO has been probing a string of fraud cases that have rocked Greece, including a case dubbed “Calypso” that involved alleged gangs extending from China to at least 14 EU countries, which were operating out of Piraeus.
The agency has confiscated over 2,400 shipping containers at the port, which is majority-owned by China’s COSCO, in the largest seizure to date across the EU.
Gangs allegedly underreported the value of goods coming from China into the EU, resulting in lost VAT revenue and duties of around 800 million euros since 2017, EPPO says.
EPPO’s investigations in recent years have also indicated that state corruption, which helped plunge Greece into a 2009-2018 debt crisis, has not been uprooted. Some of the cases have hurt the centre-right government’s popularity.
During her visit to Greece this week, Kovesi said she sought the deployment of more prosecutors and resources for EPPO in Athens. Ministers pledged support.
She also urged Greece to amend laws protecting politicians from prosecution, adding that such immunity hinders EPPO’s probes.
EPPO has referred two cases to the Greek parliament, the only body that can investigate ministers under the constitution.
One of them is linked to Greece’s worst rail disaster in 2023. The most recent case relates to Greek farmers and state officials suspected of defrauding the EU of subsidies for the use of pastureland since 2019.
(Reporting by Renee Maltezou; Adidtional reporting Yannis Souliotis; Editing by Sharon Singleton)
A cyberattack targeting check-in and boarding systems has disrupted air traffic and caused delays at several of Europe’s major airports, officials said Saturday, though the initial impact appeared to be limited.
The disruptions to electronic systems initially reported at Brussels, Berlin’s Brandenburg and London’s Heathrow airports meant that only manual check-in and boarding was possible. Many other European airports said their operations were unaffected.
“There was a cyberattack on Friday night 19 September against the service provider for the check-in and boarding systems affecting several European airports including Brussels Airport,” said Brussels Airport in a statement, initially reporting a “large impact” on flight schedules.
Airports said the issue centered around a provider of check-in and boarding systems — not airlines or the airports themselves.
People at Brandenburg Airport airport as a cyber attack has caused delays, in Berlin, Germany, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025.
Carsten Koall / AP
Collins Aerospace, whose systems help passengers check themselves in, print boarding passes and bag tags and dispatch their luggage from a kiosk, cited a “cyber-related disruption” to its MUSE (Multi-User System Environment) software at “select airports.”
As the day wore on, the fallout appeared to be contained.
Brussels Airport spokesperson Ihsane Chioua Lekhli told broadcaster VTM that by mid-morning, nine flights had been canceled, four were redirected to another airport and 15 faced delays of an hour or more. She said it wasn’t immediately clear how long the disruptions might last.
Axel Schmidt, head of communications at the Brandenburg airport, said that by late morning, “we don’t have any flights canceled due to this specific reason, but that could change.” The Berlin airport said operators had cut off connections to affected systems.
People at Brandenburg Airport airport as a cyber attack has caused delays, in Berlin, Germany, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025.
Carsten Koall / AP
Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airport, said the disruption has been “minimal” with no flight cancellations directly linked to the problems afflicting Collins. A spokesperson would not provide details as to how many flights have been delayed as a result of the cyberattack.
The airports advised travelers to check their flight status and apologized for any inconvenience.
Collins, an aviation and defense technology company that is a subsidiary of RTX Corp., formerly Raytheon Technologies, said it was “actively working to resolve the issue and restore full functionality to our customers as quickly as possible.”
“The impact is limited to electronic customer check-in and baggage drop and can be mitigated with manual check-in operations,” it said in a statement.
It wasn’t the only cyber incident targeting airports. One of Russia’s busiest airports said on Friday that its website had been hacked and was offline. Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg said that access to its website was restricted, but that operations at the nation’s second-largest air hub were unaffected and specialists were working to restore service.
