Tag Archives: Europe

Russia may be helping supply Taliban insurgents: U.S. general

Commander of U.S. Forces in Europe, General Curtis Scaparrotti speaks during a news conference in Tallinn, Estonia, March 14, 2017. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins

By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The top U.S. general in Europe said on Thursday that he had seen Russian influence on Afghan Taliban insurgents growing and raised the possibility that Moscow was helping supply the militants, whose reach is expanding in southern Afghanistan.

“I’ve seen the influence of Russia of late – increased influence in terms of association and perhaps even supply to the Taliban,” Army General Curtis Scaparrotti, who is also NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

He did not elaborate on what kinds of supplies might be headed to the Taliban or how direct Russia’s role might be.

Moscow has been critical of the United States over its handling of the war in Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union fought a bloody and disastrous war of its own in the 1980s.

But Russian officials have denied they provide aid to the insurgents, who are contesting large swaths of territory and inflicting heavy casualties, and say their limited contacts are aimed at bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table.

According to U.S. estimates, government forces control less than 60 percent of Afghanistan, with almost half the country either contested or under control of the insurgents, who are seeking to reimpose Islamic law after their 2001 ouster.

Underlying the insurgents’ growing strength, Taliban fighters have captured the strategic district of Sangin in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, officials said on Thursday.

The top U.S. commander in the country, General John Nicholson, said last month that Afghanistan was in a “stalemate” and that thousands more international troops would be needed to boost the existing NATO-led training and advisory mission.

Scaparrotti said the stakes were high. More than 1,800 American troops have been killed in fighting since the war began in 2001.

“NATO and the United States, in my view, must win in Afghanistan,” he said.

Taliban officials have told Reuters that the group has had significant contacts with Moscow since at least 2007, adding that Russian involvement did not extend beyond “moral and political support.”

(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Erdogan warns Europeans ‘will not walk safely’ if current attitude persists

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan attends a ceremony marking the 102nd anniversary of Battle of Canakkale, also known as the Gallipoli Campaign, in Canakkale, Turkey, March 18, 2017. REUTERS/Osman Orsal

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that Europeans across the world would not be able to walk safely on the streets if they kept up their current attitude.

Turkey has been embroiled in a row with Germany and the Netherlands over the barring of campaign appearances by Turkish officials seeking to drum up support for an April referendum on boosting Erdogan’s powers.

“If Europe continues this way, no European in any part of the world can walk safely on the streets. We, as Turkey, call on Europe to respect human rights and democracy,” Erdogan said at event for local journalists in Ankara.

(Reporting by Ece Toksabay and Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by Nick Tattersall)

EU leaders to meet for special Brexit summit on April 29: EU’s Tusk

European Council President Donald Tusk takes part in a news conference after being reappointed chairman of the European Council during a EU summit in Brussels, Belgium, March 9, 2017. REUTERS/Yves Herman

By Waverly Colville

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union’s 27 leaders will meet on April 29 to agree their negotiating lines for Brexit talks after London sends in a formal notification that it wants to leave the bloc, the chairman of the summit, Donald Tusk, said on Tuesday.

The meeting is a necessary step before the negotiations between Britain and the 27 remaining EU states can start formally. London said on Monday it would send in its exit notification on March 29.

“In view of what was announced in London yesterday, I’d like to inform you that I will call a European Council on Saturday, the 29th of April, to adopt the guidelines for the Brexit talks,” Tusk told reporters.

“You know I personally wish the UK hadn’t chosen to leave the EU, but the majority of British voters decided otherwise. Therefore we must do everything we can to make the process of divorce the least painful for the EU.”

The unprecedented talks are due to run for two years, though many diplomats and officials admit it would probably take longer.

“Our main priority for the negotiations must be to create as much certainty and clarity as possible for all citizens, companies and member states that will be negatively affected by Brexit, as well as our important partners and friends around the world,” Tusk added.

(Writing by Jan Strupczewski and Gabriela Baczynska)

Dutch vote in test of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe

Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders of the PVV party surrounded by security as he votes in the general election in The Hague, Netherlands, March 15, 2017. REUTERS/Dylan Martinez

By Stephanie van den Berg and Toby Sterling

THE HAGUE (Reuters) – The Dutch tested their own tolerance for immigration and Islam on Wednesday in an election magnified by a furious row with Turkey, the first of three polls in the European Union this year where nationalist parties are seeking breakthroughs.

The center-right VVD party of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, 50, is vying with the PVV (Party for Freedom) of anti-Islam and anti-EU firebrand Geert Wilders, 53, to form the biggest party in parliament.

As many as 13 million voters began casting ballots at polling stations across the country that will close at 2000 GMT. A charged campaign, plus clear skies and sunshine meant high turnout was expected. National broadcaster NOS said that by 0930 GMT in the morning, turnout was at 15 percent, 2 percent ahead of the previous parliamentary election in 2012.

With as many as four out of 10 voters undecided a day before voting and a tight margin of just 4 percent between leading candidates, the outcome was unpredictable.

Wilders, who has vowed to “de-Islamicise” the Netherlands, has little chance of forming a government given that other leading parties have ruled out working with him. But a first place PVV finish would still send shockwaves across Europe.

The vote is the first gauge this year of anti-establishment sentiment in the European Union and the bloc’s chances of survival after the 2016 surprise victory of “America First” presidential candidate Donald Trump in the United States and Britain’s vote to exit the EU.

“Whatever the outcome of the election today the genie will not go back into the bottle and this patriotic revolution, whether today or tomorrow, will take place,” Wilders said after voting at a school in The Hague.

Wilders won over Wendy de Graaf, who dropped her children off at the same school. “I hope he can make a change to make the Netherlands better.. I don’t agree with everything he says… but I feel that immigration is a problem,” she said.

France chooses its next president in May, with far-right Marine Le Pen set to make the second-round run-off, while in September right-wing euroskeptic party Alternative for Germany, which has attacked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door refugee policy, will probably win its first lower house seats.

Rutte, who has called the Dutch vote a quarter-final before a French semi-final and German final said a Wilders victory would be felt well beyond the Netherlands.

“I think the rest of the world will then see after Brexit, after the American elections again the wrong sort of populism has won the day,” he said.

Late opinion polls indicated a three percentage point lead for his party over Wilders’, with a boost from a rupture of diplomatic relations with Ankara after the Dutch banned Turkish ministers from addressing rallies of overseas Turks.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan accused the Dutch of behaving like Nazis, and Rutte’s government expelled a Turkish minister who had traveled to the country to address Erdogan supporters at an impromtu rally without seeking permission.

“I think Rutte did well this weekend with the Turkey row,” said Dave Cho, a 42-year-old supply manager and long-time VVD supporter.

On Wednesday morning, two major publicly subsidized voter information websites were offline, targeted by a DDoS cyber attack.

It was not clear whether Wednesday’s attack was related to the row with Turkey, which also led to the temporary defacement of numerous small websites in the Netherlands.

Separately on Wednesday, several large Twitter accounts including that of the European Parliament, Reuters Japan, Die Welt, Forbes, Amnesty International and Duke University were hijacked temporarily, apparently by Turkish activists.

NO CLEAR WINNER, WEEKS OF BARGAINING

Unlike the U.S. or French presidential elections, there will be no outright Dutch winner under its system of proportional representation. Up to 15 parties could win a seat in parliament and none are set to reach even 20 percent of the vote.

Experts predict a coalition-building process that will take many months once the final tally is known.

Rutte’s last government was a two-party coalition with the Labour Party, but with no party polling above 17 percent, at least four will be needed to secure a majority in parliament. It would be the first such multi-party alliance since three in the 1970s. Two of those fell apart within 12 months.

In a final debate on Tuesday night, Wilders clashed with Lodewijk Asscher, whose Labour party stands to lose two-thirds of its seats in its worst defeat ever on current polling.

Asscher defended the rights of law-abiding Muslims to not be treated as second-class citizens or insulted, saying “the Netherlands belongs to all of us, and everyone who does his best.” Wilders shot back: “The Netherlands is not for everyone. The Netherlands is for the Dutch.”

Front-runner Rutte, who is hoping Dutch economic recovery will help him carry the election, has been insistent on one thing – that he will neither accept the PVV as a coalition partner nor rely on Wilders to support a minority government, as he did in 2010-2012.

“Not, never, not,” Rutte told Wilders.

(Additional reporting by Phil Blenkinsop and Anthony Deutsch; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

SAP pushes to patch risky HANA security flaws before hackers strike

SAP logo at SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany, January 24, 2017. REUTERS/Ralph Orlowski

By Eric Auchard

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Europe’s top software maker SAP said on Tuesday it had patched vulnerabilities in its latest HANA software that had a potentially high risk of giving hackers control over databases and business applications used to run big multinational firms. While hacks on phones, websites and computers that consumers rely on every day grab headlines, vulnerabilities in big business software are more lucrative to attackers as these tools store data and run transactions which are the lifeblood of businesses. The latest security weaknesses, known in industry parlance as “zero day” vulnerabilities, rank among the most critical ever found in HANA, the engine that runs SAP’s latest database, cloud and other more traditional business apps, according to Onapsis, the security company which uncovered these issues.

SAP software acts as the corporate plumbing for many multinationals and the company claims 87 percent of the top 2,000 global companies as customers.

Onapsis said vulnerabilities lay in a HANA component known as “User Self Service” (USS) which would allow malicious insiders or remote attackers to fully compromise vulnerable systems, without so much as valid usernames and passwords.

It reported 10 HANA vulnerabilities to SAP less than 60 days ago, which the German software maker fixed in near-record time, according to interviews with executives of both companies.

The resulting patch issued by SAP on Tuesday was rated by it as 9.8 on a scale of 10, “very high” in terms of relative risk to its customers. SAP is releasing five HANA patches this week to fix a range of vulnerabilities uncovered in recent months.

“SAP has done a great job by releasing fixes much faster than in past situations,” Onapsis Chief Executive Mariano Nunez told Reuters in an interview.

Customers must in turn choose when to apply such patches to software that runs their most critical corporate functions, a process that may take months or years, in rare cases. They must balance security risks against operational demands.

SAP executives urged security managers working for its customers to patch relevant systems.

“There has not been one case where a customer who applied the recommended patches has been affected,” Siddhartha Rao, vice president of SAP Product Security Response, said of the six years he has been on the job. “We currently expect there will not be that many customers affected by these issues,” he said.

Last May, however, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued an alert advising SAP customers they needed to urgently plug holes for which SAP already had offered patches in 2010, but which some customers failed to adopt, leaving dozens exposed to hacker break-ins afterward. (http://reut.rs/2mkTVgI)

Three dozen enterprises were found to have telltale signs of unauthorized access due to outdated or misconfigured SAP NetWeaver Java systems, Onapsis said at the time.

Onapsis helps secure more than 200 SAP customers ranging from Schlumberger to Sony Corp, Westinghouse and the U.S. Army. It also identifies security vulnerabilities for corporate customers in rival systems from Oracle.

Giving HANA customers breathing room, the USS component first offered by SAP in October 2014 is not activated by default, but must be specially enabled, Onapsis said.

It has identified two companies – an energy company and a retailer – where vulnerabilities were found and fixed. Companies which are not using USS features are unaffected, Onapsis said.

Technical details can be found on the security blogs of SAP (https://goo.gl/11Dz5w) and Onapsis (https://goo.gl/Xiryyp). There is no evidence hackers have taken advantage so far, the companies said.

Last year, the company issued more than 160 patches in all, SAP said. Ten percent of these were HANA related, Onapsis added.

(Reporting by Eric Auchard; Editing by Stephen Coates)

Turkish tensions with Europe risk spilling into Switzerland

European Union (L) and Turkish flags fly outside a hotel in Istanbul, Turkey May 4, 2016. REUTERS/Murad Sezer/File Photo

By Michael Shields

ZURICH (Reuters) – Neutral Switzerland risks getting swept up in Turkey’s political row with European countries as Swiss authorities weigh how to handle Turks’ requests for asylum and a call to ban a rally on Sunday by Turkey’s foreign minister.

The government was keeping a low profile on Thursday, saying only that it was reviewing a request by financial capital Zurich to block a planned weekend appearance by Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu for security reasons.

The Hilton hotel booked for the rally canceled the event, saying organizers could not ensure the safety of guests and visitors.

It comes amid a series of speaking engagements to galvanize support among the Turkish community for President Tayyip Erdogan’s bid to increase his powers in a referendum on April 16.

The foreign ministry declined to comment on media reports that several Turks with diplomatic passports, including the second-ranking envoy in Bern, had sought asylum after President Tayyip Erdogan’s crackdown in the wake of a failed coup last year.

The State Secretariat for Migration, which handles asylum requests, said it does not comment on individual requests for refugee status. It referred instead to a government response this week to a parliamentary query on the matter.

That note said 408 Turkish citizens had sought asylum since the July coup attempt, including some holders of diplomatic passports. It said it could not comment further on the “very few individual cases” among diplomats for fear it could give away their identities.

Turkish embassy officials in Bern were not immediately available by phone and did not respond to an email seeking comment.

During a visit to neighboring Germany on Wednesday, Cavusoglu accused Berlin of hostility towards his country and Islam as acrimony between the NATO allies showed no sign of abating.

On Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel told Turkey to stop comparing the German government to the Nazis over the cancellation of Turkish ministers’ rallies in Germany, only for Cavusoglu to repeat the comparison.

Ankara is furious over the cancellations. Germany has said the rallies can go ahead if the organizers respect local laws, but has canceled several rallies, citing security concerns.

In Austria, the interior minister said this week he wanted to change legislation to permit a ban on foreign officials making speeches in Austria if human rights or public order were threatened, a move aimed at Turkish politicians.

Swiss government statistics show around 68,000 Turkish citizens live in Switzerland, a nation of 8.3 million whose population is a quarter foreign. The Turkish embassy’s website refers to around 130,000 Turkish citizens.

(Additional reporting by Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

EU tries to contain East-West schism as Brexit bites

European and national flags fly outside the European Parliament while European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker presents a white paper on options for shoring up unity once Britain launches its withdrawal process, in Brussels, Belgium, March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Yves Herman

By Alastair Macdonald

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – As Britain hands the European Union its formal notice to quit this month, Brussels is resigned to losing part of the EU’s western flank but is increasingly stressed that upset in the east is pulling the survivors further apart.

Poland, the biggest of the ex-communist eastern states to join after the Cold War, has picked a fight over the fairly minor matter of who chairs EU summits. Symptomatic of a mounting east-west friction, the spat will overshadow a meeting this week that was meant to forge post-Brexit unity.

Brexit has not created that friction but made it worse, as leaders struggle to quell popular disaffection with the EU that is by no means confined to Britain. Westerners are talking up faster integration, even if that means leaving nationalistic easterners behind in a “multispeed Europe”.

When Chancellor Angela Merkel, raised in East Germany and a key defender of eastern allies, joined her French, Italian and Spanish peers at Versailles on Monday to ram home a message that unless some states press ahead the EU will stall and break, Polish ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski hit right back.

“The decisions made in … Versailles … aim to reinforce the process of European Union disintegration which has started with Brexit,” he said on Tuesday.

Kaczynski will not be in Brussels for Thursday’s summit but his prime minister, Beata Szydlo, will give voice to his refusal to endorse the reappointment of her centrist predecessor Donald Tusk as European Council president. Tusk and the right-wing Kaczynski are old and bitter rivals in Polish politics.

BREXIT HOLE

Brexit deprives the easterners, unwilling to see diktat from Brussels or Berlin replace rule from Moscow, of their strongest ally against EU centralization and euro zone domination.

It also leaves a big hole in the EU budget for paying the subsidies that fund a large slice of public spending in the east — cash that has kept voters there sold on EU membership and which Brussels fears London may now use to court eastern favor and divide the EU to extract better Brexit terms.

On Friday, leaders will work on plans for a March 25 summit in Rome where they hope to use 60th anniversary celebrations of the bloc’s founding treaty to pledge a new unity after Brexit.

Yet the road to Rome has been marked with division over the push by founding powers and the EU executive led by Jean-Claude Juncker for more differentiated EU integration.

“The key message of Rome must be the unity of the 27,” said a senior EU official involved in looking for compromises to ease the friction. “The political context of Brexit should not be a multispeed Europe. That would be completely out of tune.”

Neither side is pushing for a split and all insist they must pull together against challenges from Russia and uncertainty about U.S. support under President Donald Trump. For that reason, officials say, the words to come out of the Brussels and Rome summits will stress unity and soft-pedal the differences.

FRICTION GROWING

But east-west friction has heated up in the past two years.

There are rows over eastern reluctance to take in Syrian refugees and Kaczynski’s new policies that Brussels calls undemocratic. New border controls to curb migrants inside the passport-free Schengen zone have fueled eastern fears of losing travel freedoms cherished since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And there is a brewing crisis over what eastern leaders see as hypocritical protectionism inside the EU single market by western governments trying to impose their own national minimum wages on enterprising — and cheap — eastern “posted workers”, who offer services like trucking and construction in the west.

Last week Poland and its allies demanded Brussels crack down on the “double standards” of firms that offer lower quality versions of western food brands in eastern markets.

It is not just outspoken Poland and Hungary who fret at fragmentation. The worry runs from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Eastern diplomats fear a new gap could open up along the old Iron Curtain that may never close, especially if the rich states play up to voters and refuse to fill the EU’s Brexit budget gap.

Prime Minister Robert Fico told Slovakia’s parliament on Wednesday he was skeptical of the Union’s future once Britain leaves in 2019.

“I’m afraid the EU will be divided by the money issue after 2020…In the spirit of Trump’s ‘America first’, we can expect to hear ‘Germany first’, ‘France first’ etc.”

Noting that current EU arrangements already allow for states to deepen their cooperation — the euro is just one of many examples — a senior diplomat from an eastern member state said he was suspicious of assurances from Merkel and others that any new moves would always be open to any member state to join.

“The only new thing they can mean is that this has changed,” he said. “They are saying ‘No, you are not welcome any more’.

“This is very dangerous.”

(Additional reporting by Lidia Kelly and Justyna Pawlak in Warsaw and Tatiana Jancarikova in Bratislava; Editing by Gareth Jones)

EU needs common approach on testing banks’ cyber-risks: Dombrovskis

European Commission Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis addresses a news conference on the European Semester Winter Package in Brussels, Belgium February 22, 2017. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – European Union countries should test bank defenses against cyber-attacks using a common set of requirements, a senior EU official said on Tuesday, as the bloc plans measures to boost the retail market for financial products.

Cyber attacks against banks have increased in numbers and sophistication in recent years, raising questions on lenders’ capacity to protect their customers.

Seeking to reassure savers and strengthen financial stability, several EU countries are conducting tests on banks’ security systems, but EU authorities warned national initiatives may be less effective and more costly than a common EU approach.

“We want to avoid a proliferation of testing obligations that operate in different countries,” the EU commission’s vice president Valdis Dombrovskis told a conference in Brussels.

“We believe tests that meet comparable standards should be recognized across borders,” he added. This could pave the way for common stress-tests carried out at EU level, as suggested by EU officials in past weeks.

The call for higher cyber-security comes as the Commission prepares a policy action plan on retail financial services, such as insurance, loans and payments, that will be released in the coming weeks.

Dombrovskis said the plan would encourage the use of remote identification schemes, such as e-signature and e-identification, to try to boost consumers’ access to financial services and lower costs.

It will also attempt to facilitate the take-up of new technologies in the financial sector, where emerging fintech companies are challenging traditional actors in a range of services, including payments and insurance.

“Our focus should be on removing barriers to market entry and keeping our legislation proportionate,” Dombrovskis said, noting that changes may create new risks that need to be addressed with greater sharing of information among financial firms and common testing of security systems.

(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio; Editing by Keith Weir)

UK economy picks up in late 2016 but signs of Brexit hit appear

Workers walk to work during the morning rush hour in the financial district of Canary Wharf in London, Britain, January 26, 2017. REUTERS/Eddie Keogh

By Andy Bruce and William Schomberg

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s economy sped up at the end of 2016, data showed, but over the whole year it was weaker than previously thought and there were signs that the Brexit vote will increasingly act as a brake on growth in 2017.

The pound fell after Wednesday’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures, which no longer showed Britain was the fastest-growing major advanced economy last year.

Gross domestic product rose by 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter, faster than the preliminary reading of 0.6 percent thanks to manufacturing and the strongest growth since the fourth quarter of 2015.

The figures are likely to reinforce finance minister Philip Hammond’s view that there is no case right now to borrow more to help the economy when he announces his annual budget on March 8.

But he will keep a close eye on warning signs in Wednesday’s data.

Business investment fell and slowing household spending growth raised questions about the outlook for 2017.

The ONS also trimmed its estimate for 2016 growth to 1.8 percent from 2.0 percent, due to businesses stockpiling fewer goods and materials in early 2016.

That pushed Britain’s economic growth rate slightly below Germany’s 1.9 percent.

Separate ONS data showed Britain’s dominant services sector expanded in December at the slowest pace in seven months.

Angus Armstrong, director of macroeconomics at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, said the familiar pattern of consumers driving the economy was likely to fade.

“The UK economy needs another driver if it is not to have a significant slowdown in 2017,” he said. “The pattern of strong consumer spending and weaker business investment can only be a limited one.”

Business investment fell 1.0 percent in the fourth quarter compared with the July-September period. Investment by companies was 0.9 percent lower compared with the fourth quarter of 2015.

Firms are expected to rein in their investment plans as Britain negotiates its departure from the EU, a process that Prime Minister Theresa May is due to kick off in coming weeks.

The outlook for wages is key for spending by households who have driven Britain’s economy since the Brexit vote. Wednesday’s data showed compensation of employees edged up by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter, the weakest rise in more than three years.

BREXIT SQUEEZE

The ONS said household spending increased 0.7 percent on the quarter, slowing from 0.9 percent in the third quarter and marking the weakest growth in a year.

Bank of England deputy governor Minouche Shafik said after the data that the central bank still expected overall economic growth this year of 2.0 percent, much stronger than most economists polled by Reuters expect.

But the bank also predicts a growing squeeze on consumers as inflation rises due to the pound’s fall since June’s vote to leave the European Union.

There are signs this has started. Data last week showed retail sales fell in each of the three months to January.

The BoE this month signaled that it is in no hurry to raise interest rates with so much Brexit-related uncertainty ahead.

The central bank expects the economy to grow at a slower pace in subsequent years than if Britain had voted to stay in the EU.

(Editing by John Stonestreet)

‘Alarming’ superbugs a risk to people, animals and food, EU warns

electronic microscope of superbug

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) – Superbug bacteria found in people, animals and food across the European Union pose an “alarming” threat to public and animal health having evolved to resist widely used antibiotics, disease and safety experts warned on Wednesday.

A report on antimicrobial resistance in bacteria by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said some 25,000 people die from such superbugs in the European Union every year.

“Antimicrobial resistance is an alarming threat putting human and animal health in danger,” said Vytenis Andriukaitis, the EU’s health and food safety commissioner.

“We have put substantial efforts to stop its rise, but this is not enough. We must be quicker, stronger and act on several fronts.”

Drug resistance is driven by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which encourages bacteria to evolve to survive and develop new ways of beating the medicines.

Wednesday’s report highlighted that in Salmonella bacteria – which can cause the common and serious food-borne infection Salmonellosis – multi-drug resistance is high across the EU.

Mike Catchpole, the ECDC’s chief scientist, said he was particularly concerned that some common types of Salmonella in humans, such as monophasic Salmonella Typhimurium, are showing extremely high multi-drug resistance.

“Prudent use of antibiotics in human and veterinary medicine is extremely important,” he said. “We all have a responsibility to ensure that antibiotics keep working.”

Resistance to carbapenem antibiotics – usually the last remaining treatment option for patients infected with multi-drug resistant superbugs – was detected for the first time in animals and food, albeit at low levels, as part of EU-wide annual monitoring for the report.

It said very low levels of resistance were observed in E. coli bacteria found in pigs and in meat from pigs.

Resistance to colistin, another last-resort human antibiotic – was also found at very low levels in Salmonella and E. coli in pigs and cattle, the report said.

Marta Hugas, head of EFSA’s biological hazards and contaminants unit, noted geographic variations across the European Union, with countries in northern and western Europe generally having lower resistance levels than those in southern and eastern Europe and said this was most likely due to differences in the level of use and overuse of the medicines.

“In countries where actions have been taken to reduce, replace and re-think the use of antimicrobials in animals show lower levels of antimicrobial resistance and decreasing trends,” she said.

(This story is a refile to remove extraneous word in first paragraph)

(Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)