The United Kingdom took steps on Tuesday to ramp up its defense spending ahead of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s meeting with President Donald Trump this week.

Starmer said that in the face of continued Russian aggression against Ukraine and, by extension, Europe, the UK will increase its defense spending to 2.5% of its gross domestic value, up from the 2.3% it currently spends – an increase that amounts to £13.4 billion, or nearly $17 billion more each year on defense.

In the five weeks since President Trump took office, the Atlantic Ocean has rarely looked wider.

A chasm has opened between the United States and its European allies over Trump's handling of Ukraine, Russia, Gaza and cross-border trade.

In almost every way, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will walk into the White House on Thursday as an alien in President Donald Trump’s MAGA universe: a former human rights lawyer, a onetime top prosecutor and, after vanquishing Conservatives in elections last summer, the United Kingdom’s most liberal leader in more than a decade.

TBILISI, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Georgian lawmakers elected Mikheil Kavelashvili, a hardline critic of the West, as president on Saturday, setting him up to replace a pro-Western incumbent amid major protests against the government over a halt to the country’s European Union accession talks last month.

European diplomats have already started key negotiations on who will take the main jobs at the European Union following elections next month.

Voters across the 27-member EU are heading to the polls between June 6 and 9 to choose the next set of representatives in the European Parliament. The very top EU jobs, which aren’t directly elected, then get dished out in the weeks following. They hold sway over central policymaking and Brussels ultimately impacts the livelihoods of 450 million people across the region.

WARSAW, March 13 (Reuters) - Polish farmers increased the number of trucks they let through the Dorohusk border crossing with Ukraine on Wednesday but backpedalled on a promise to unblock it completely, state news agency PAP reported on Wednesday.

Protest leader Wojciech Los told PAP that the number of trucks allowed to cross had been raised to five per hour from one or two previously. He had previously said that all trucks stuck there would be allowed through as a gesture of goodwill.

A European consumer rights consortium has released a scathing new report accusing Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, of using a privacy “smokescreen” to obscure what it’s deemed a “massive, illegal” data collection scheme.

In particular, the European Consumer Organisation says Meta’s Nov. 2023 policy of charging European Union residents a monthly privacy fee if they don’t want to be tracked violates an EU privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).