Eurotopics.net

Spain's left-wing governing coalition consisting of the Socialist Party (PSOE) and its junior partner Unidas Podemos has presented a bill aimed at regulating the housing market. The legislation foresees a rent cap for urban areas and landlords who own more than ten residential properties. Local authorities would be free to decide whether to implement it. Several conservative municipalities, including Madrid, have already announced that they will not apply the law.

Over the past 70 years roughly 330,000 children have been victims of sexual abuse within the French Catholic Church, according to a report compiled by an independent commission of inquiry over two and a half years. Europe's media discuss what changes are needed after the shocking revelations.

Things are not looking good for tech giant Facebook. Several of the company's service were offline for hours on Monday evening due to a massive outage. Instagram and WhatsApp were also affected. Then on Tuesday, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen made serious accusations against the company before the US Congress. Europe's media stress the need to review security on the Internet.

Representatives of the European Union and the Western Balkan states are meeting in Slovenia today to discuss, among other issues, EU enlargement. But since the member states have not been able to agree on a concrete accession date for Serbia, Albania or northern Macedonia and have only pledged investment aid amounting to nine billion euros there is a lot of frustration and disappointment in the media.

In Romania, the centre-right government of Florin Cîțu (PNL) has been ousted following a no-confidence vote initiated by the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and supported by the liberal Union to Save Romania party (USR-Plus), which had been thrown out of the governing coalition, and the right-wing nationalist AUR. Since it is not clear which parties could form a governing majority, commentators fear a long period of uncertainty - in the midst of the fourth wave of the pandemic.