BRUSSELS — At least 15 European flights were targeted by bomb threats Thursday, following seven similar incidents earlier in the week in which authorities found no explosives.

Irish airline Aer Lingus reported that one of its flights from Dublin to Rome was diverted to an airport in France following a security threat.

The office of French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said that the plane landed safely in Évreux, northwest of Paris, and that the 157 people on board were taken to safety.

According to the BBC, two other flights were diverted Thursday following similar alerts: a Wizz Air plane from Milan to Warsaw, which was diverted to Vienna; and a Ryanair flight from London to Sofia, which was diverted to Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

Finnish carrier Finnair said that two of its aircraft — both departing from Helsinki and bound for Rome and Vienna — faced “faced unfounded or hoax bomb threats” and were subject to police checks after landing. The plane bound for Rome was also escorted by Italian fighter jets.

“Unfortunately, air traffic is sometimes subject to threats, as we have seen this week, when also other airlines in Europe have faced hoax bomb threats,” said spokesperson Päivyt Tallqvist.

Another bomb threat affected a flight operated by LOT from Warsaw to Brussels Airport on Thursday morning. Airport spokesperson Ihsane Chioua Lekhli told Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad that police carried out searches and no further security measures were deemed necessary.

LOT said that another aircraft scheduled to fly from Warsaw to Paris “was stopped while taxiing and directed to a designated parking stand” before departure.

“The aircraft and all baggage underwent a security screening,” said the airline, which added that no hazardous items were found and that the flight departed with a replacement aircraft.

Italian news agency ANSA reported that two flights bound for Milan Malpensa Airport — an Aegean Airlines flight from Thessaloniki and a Ryanair flight from Porto — were also searched following bomb threats.

Two other Ryanair flights bound for Sofia — one from Copenhagen and the other from Madrid — were also reportedly targeted by bomb threats.

Czech police said on social media that four flights bound for Prague Airport were also threatened, but officers assessed “the severity of the threats as low.”

Ben Smith, CEO of Air France–KLM, said that the threats were happening “in a coordinated way.”

“I don’t think we’ve seen this before,” he said during a Thursday earnings call, but added that the airline group is not making any requests of governments. “We’re quite confident that we have in place what we need to ensure that it has minimal or no impact on our operations.”

EU Transport Commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas said: “It is too early to draw conclusions on whether the reported incidents are linked.”

He added that the EU-level information sharing mechanism for aviation security has been activated. “We don’t have information yet whether this is a cyber attack,” he said.

EU Aviation Safety Agency spokesperson Janet Northcote said: “The immediate safety threat from individual hoax threats is low. However, the higher number of diversions places an additional strain on the system.”

Seven passenger aircraft were searched on Monday and Tuesday by authorities in Spain, Poland, Italy and Bulgaria following bomb threats. No explosives were found, but the alerts also led to the temporary closure of Warsaw Chopin Airport.

The risk of someone successfully smuggling a bomb aboard an airplane is low, said Jan-Arwed Richter, CEO of JACDEC, an aviation-safety analysis firm.

“Today there is hardly any thinkable way to get explosives aboard a commercial flight,” he said. “The last real bombing of a flight took place on Oct. 31, 2015 on a flight from Egypt to Russia because of security loopholes and personnel shortcomings that were rectified immediately.”

This article has been updated.

LONDON — Britain’s government runs on numbers — but what if they’re a shot in the dark?

From tepid economic growth to squeezed household incomes, this week’s budget from Chancellor John Healey was packed with grim figures about the state of play in the U.K. — and a host of costly measures to try and turn things around.

Yet it’s almost certain that the budget forecasts Healey relied upon Wednesday will be revised by the time the next fiscal event rolls around.

In this week’s episode of the Westminster Insider podcast, POLITICO unpacked the numbers that govern the U.K. — and found out just how many doubts there are about the information the country relies on.

1. True levels of immigration

Few issues divide Brits like immigration — but grappling with hard data on the issue has proven to be a repeated challenge to governments of all stripes.

For decades, immigration into the U.K. was calculated by the International Passenger Survey (IPS) — essentially people with clipboards at airports, train stations and ports asking people about their intention to stay in the U.K.

But between 2012 and 2020, the number of European Union nationals coming into the country was off by 76% — or 93,000 people a year. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) only discovered this error after trialing a new approach to counting immigration that focused less heavily on the IPS, which was dropped altogether in 2025.

The ONS now uses this new measurement — relying on a combination of Home Office data, information from the Department for Work and Pensions and tax receipts.

But this was again wrong in the year to June 2023 — by 234,000 people.

The original numbers published by the ONS in November 2023 said net migration to the U.K. was 672,000. A year later, the ONS admitted there had been a mistake and said it was in fact 906,000.

Laura Gilbert, who ran data science in No. 10 Downing Street until last year, told POLITICO that net migration numbers are often incredibly misleading — and even the way we calculate those numbers is “highly spurious.”

Gilbert says the quality of the numbers on immigration normally improves months later, sometimes by “quite a lot.” But she warned, “if politicians are making a decision based on exact numbers, often they are using the first number that comes out, which is the worst one.”

2. The scale of unemployment

Healey and Prime Minister Andy Burnham have vowed to get welfare spending down “but in a Labour way.” Much of this will rest on getting young people into work, the subject of a 217-page report by Tony Blair-era minister Alan Milburn.

But Britain’s workforce — and the number of young people out of work — is counted by the Labour Force Survey (LFS), an ONS measurement beset with issues.

For example, between 2019 and 2024, the LFS missed 1 million workers because people with full-time jobs are less likely to answer the phone to surveyors during the week, according to the Resolution Foundation think tank.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) admitted just this week that the survey is too unreliable to measure productivity. “In recent years, falling response rates have significantly affected the quality of the LFS, making it more difficult to estimate reliably the number of workers and the hours they work,” the watchdog said.

Gilbert says Healey’s claim that there are “1 million young people out of work” is unlikely to be accurate.

The number of NEETs — people not in education, employment or training — is also based on figures from a subset of the LFS, which is particularly susceptible to inaccuracies.

“I think being within 50,000 on either side of that number is very unlikely to be the sort of level of accuracy that you’re at,” Gilbert said. “It’s entirely spurious, if I’m completely honest, but it’s a big number, you write it down, and everyone reads the papers.”

Ben Warner, who set up 10DS, Downing Street’s data science unit, says the LFS can’t accurately measure the number of entrepreneurs arriving in the country, either, making it difficult for ministers to know if decisions — such as a much-hyped tax relief for founders — are actually encouraging people to come to the U.K.

“I’m willing to bet you a hundred quid [we don’t have accurate numbers] at the level that you would need to make thoughtful policy around this,” Warner said. “I am sure there are people who have very, very good knowledge of the economic statistics. But if you’re a minister, you don’t necessarily have access.”

3. Where inflation and GDP sit

These are hugely important measures for a government: Are costs rising for households — and is the British economy growing?

But buried inside this week’s budget assessment by the OBR was a startling admission: There is a one in five chance inflation in 2027 will come in at over 4.5% … and the same chance it will be under 2.5%. They are profoundly different outcomes for the cost of living, a top political issue.

Warner told POLITICO, “The whole thing is mental. We are discussing the uncertainty of the numbers and pretending that these are real.”

Gilbert says there are knock-on effects at play: problems with net migration numbers and workforce data bleed into inflation and GDP projections.

“Understanding migration tells us about the demographics of the country, and when we look at how many people are in work, and that is wildly undercounted, it looks like there are more people who are unemployed, which has a knock-on effect on GDP and inflation,” she explained.

4. The number of kids on free school meals

The number of pupils in England on free school meals is just over 2.2 million, according to government statistics from the start of this year. That’s more than a quarter of all children in the country.

But Gilbert warns that these numbers are likely to be overestimated because schools “game the system” when census data is collected. “So for anyone who has children in school they may have received a text message that says don’t send them to school with a packed lunch — because the schools get funding based on how many children are on school meals,” she said.

5. The number of rough sleepers on the streets

One of Burnham’s flagship promises when he became prime minister was to end homelessness in the U.K., and Wednesday’s budget put £432 million towards precisely that promise.

Yet the way rough sleepers are counted in the U.K. varies according to each council, with some areas relying on an estimate and others on a street count — sending workers out to physically count the number of people on the streets on a particular day in autumn.

Some councils have swapped between methods — which can make it look as though they have dramatically reduced their rough sleepers from one year to the next.

For example, in 2017 Brighton and Hove Council used an estimate of rough sleepers which put that number at 176. The following year, the council used a street count — but this took place on a snowy night, so the number fell to 68.

This made it appear as though the number of people experiencing homelessness had been more than halved.

ROME — Roadblocks by truckers in southern Italy are exposing the limits of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s hardline approach toward protests, as she concedes she will have to take a carrot-and-stick approach to demonstrators struggling with soaring fuel costs.

The demonstrations across the south are fast spiraling into a full-blown economic crisis. Truck drivers and farmers protesting soaring diesel bills have blocked highways, ports and distribution centers this week, leaving supermarket shelves empty and petrol pumps dry. Airports in the south are also suffering from fuel shortages.

After a cabinet meeting on Thursday, the right-wing Meloni vowed to use a security decree to clear the roadblocks, but also pledged to give financial relief to farmers and fishermen crippled by the price of diesel.

Regarding the decree, she said her government would not be “blackmailed by those who use violence as an instrument of pressure.” But she cushioned that blow by acknowledging that financial relief measures were needed to offer “immediate responses, especially to workers, to people who are in difficulty, to families.”

With elections expected in spring next year, the truckers’ protests threaten to shift the political debate from immigration and crime to whether Italians can afford to keep their businesses running. 

Gaetano Amato, a lawmaker from Naples for the populist left 5Star Movement, accused the government of offering security measures instead of answers to the economic grievances driving the protests.

“The government has done nothing and is continuing to do nothing, because it is basing everything on security decrees,” he told POLITICO. 

Stefano Orlacchio, president of the opposition center-left Democratic Party’s youth wing in the southern region of Campania, also slammed the government’s response as “an anti-southern attitude.”

“The protests in the south aren’t being taken into consideration at all,” he told POLITICO.

Diesel squeeze

At the heart of the revolt is a squeeze that truckers say they can no longer absorb. Diesel prices in Italy have risen by about a third since the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began, and the cost of a long haul journey like Naples to Milan has climbed with them. 

Pasquale, a truck driver with a Campania-based company, who asked POLITICO to withhold his surname for fear of retaliation, said a trip’s profit had now shrunk sharply once fuel, tolls and wages were covered, and that the extra cost was working its way down the supply chain to supermarket shelves. 

Far-right Transport Minister Matteo Salvini of the League party, who posed in a truck cab a few months ago, should “come spend a week with me and we’ll see how comfortable it is,” Pasquale quipped.

While a cap on fuel prices exists on paper, he added petrol stations had ignored it “in these days of chaos.”

Beyond fuel prices, Pasquale zeroed in on EU environmental rules that Italian businesses struggle to comply with, even as cheaper foreign produce continues to reach supermarket shelves. “How can you face something like that?” he asked.

The Brussels-based International Road Transport Union has also appealed directly to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for help. 

In a letter sent on Thursday and seen by POLITICO, the group and its national member associations said they did not support the blockades but warned that soaring diesel prices were pushing operators to the brink, calling for extended EU state aid and tougher rules on late payments from customers.

The blockades hit hundreds of supermarkets and dozens of distribution centers, according to retailers’ association Federdistribuzione. Fresh fruit, meat and fish ran out within days, followed by other food products, leaving some shops completely empty.

Carlo Alberto Buttarelli, the association’s president, put the damage at “tens of millions of euros,” with fresh food spoiling in trucks and warehouses. Supplies were beginning to resume in Sicily and Calabria on Thursday, but disruption remained in Campania. 

No room to maneuver

Meloni has limited resources to offer relief. Italy remains subject to EU deficit proceedings, constraining Rome’s room for additional spending, while the international instability driving fuel prices higher lies largely beyond her control.

Amato dismissed the announced support from the cabinet meeting on Thursday as money that had already been promised.

While the government’s reaction to last weekend’s northern protests, which were hijacked by masked gangs that looted shops and set fires, was to link the unrest to immigration and deploy troops, the southern unrest is harder for Meloni to handle because it demands concrete economic relief, said Marco Valbruzzi, a researcher at the University of Naples Federico II.

Frustrated voters could turn to the 5Star Movement, which has previously channeled economic discontent in the south, or abstain from voting altogether. 

The protests could also weaken the appeal of early elections expected in April or May next year. A winter of sustained protests would give Meloni a reason to wait until autumn 2027, hoping for an ease in international instability and improved fiscal flexibility. 

If economic grievances dominate the campaign, “she is playing an electoral game on a field that she cannot control,” Valbruzzi said.