Euobserver.com

The EU should force US firm Facebook to change its ways even if litigation took "years without end", European anti-trust chief Margrethe Vestager told DW Tuesday. Facebook posed a risk to "young people's mental health" as well as "democracy" and needed external regulators, she said. Legal action should also try to help "smaller businesses ... get full access to the market" which Facebook has dominated, Vestager added.

The UK launched a major search-and-rescue operation Tuesday for three migrants missing in the English Channel after finding two others whose boat went off-course, The Times reports. Over 20,000 people crossed the Channel so far this year, including 145 on Tuesday. The UK is currently drafting new laws that will give its coast guard legal immunity if people drown after their boats are pushed back toward France by British vessels.

Israel on Tuesday signed up to the EU's next Horizon science programme, worth €96bn from 2021-2027, with its foreign minister Yair Lapid saying the move "positions Israel as a central player in the largest and most important research and development programme in the world". Horizon's terms forbid Israel from spending EU money in Israeli facilities on occupied Palestinian territories, amid EU concern, repeated Monday, about ongoing Israeli settlement expansion.

"The early detections of the A (H3N2) subtype are an indication that the upcoming flu season could be severe, although we cannot know for sure," Pasi Penttinen, an expert at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said Tuesday. Elderly people, pregnant women, and those with chronic illnesses were most at risk, while health-care providers were already at breaking point due to the pandemic, the EU agency added.

A Dutch court has said the Ukrainian state should take custody of ancient gold artefacts from Russia-occupied Crimea, instead of four museums on the annexed peninsula, who tried get them back from the Netherlands' Allard Pierson Museum, where they were loaned in 2014. "After the 'Scythian gold', we'll return Crimea," Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky said. Russia did not comment. Tuesday's decision can still be appealed at the Dutch Supreme Court.

Some 73 percent of Poles said Warsaw should back down in its rule-of-law dispute with Brussels in a survey by IBRiS for the Rzeczpospolita newspaper Tuesday, even as Russian media had a field day with Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki's recent anti-EU interview in the Financial Times. The Izvestia and Lenta newspapers said he had warned of "a Third World War over the EU", while RT praised Morawiecki's "great words".

Environment ministers and representatives sought - and failed to find - common ground, following the gridlocked summit of EU leaders, on solutions to rising energy prices.

Sweden's centre-right MEP Tomas Tobe is steering the core bill on migration and asylum through the European Parliament. But his draft proposal has been met with resistance from liberal left leaning MEPs, possibly creating another political deadlock.

The commission vice-president Vera Jourova highlighted Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and France - where developments in the media market have caused concern, and admitted the "state of the media in EU is not good".

EU institutions and states abdicated their responsibilities for search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean, deputising Libya to take their place, withdrawing naval assets from high-seas corridors, and obstructing, even criminalising, NGO groups, writes the European director of Human Rights Watch.

A commitment to fighting racism cannot go hand in hand with 'Fortress Europe' policies which demonise black, brown and Muslim refugees and migrants or with rights violations linked to Frontex pushbacks.

European states risked wasting the €750bn in their post-pandemic recovery fund, Ireland's member of the EU's Court of Auditors, a financial watchdog, has warned. "Where money is being put out quicker, normally you would say the risk of fraud is inherently higher," Tony Murphy said Monday. "The other risk is that we would get projects which are not the best quality," he told the Irish Times newspaper.

Some Covid hygiene rules were reimposed in the Czech Republic and Romania on Monday, while Poland and the Netherlands said they were considering similar steps, amid a surge in infections, especially in eastern Europe. "The pandemic is far from over," the World Health Organisation said. "It's mainly unvaccinated people who need care, who have the highest risk of getting infected and infecting others," Dutch health minister Hugo de Jonge said.

We propose a mandatory solidarity mechanism that allows for flexible options. Every member state will have to contribute in one way or another - through either relocation, return sponsorship or capacity-building measures, writes EPP rapporteur Tomas Tobé MEP.

In 2009 Connie Hedegaard presided over the Copenhagen climate conference that ended in rancour - and left Europe on the sidelines. Hedegaard went on to become the first European commissioner for climate action.

The European Commission has demanded the immediate release of the detained Sudanese leadership, including its prime minister and other cabinet members. "We call on the security forces to immediately release those they have unlawfully detained," EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a statement. PM Abdalla Hamdok was detained after the military dissolved the civilian government and declared a state of emergency.

The European Union has demanded Israel stop settler expansion, after Israeli authorities on Sunday announced the publication of tenders for the construction of more than 1,300 housing units in the occupied Palestinian territories. "We call upon the government of Israel to halt settlement construction and to not proceed with the announced tenders," said an EU spokesperson in a statement.

Facebook will fuel more episodes of violent unrest around the world because of the way its algorithms are designed to promote divisive content, whistleblower Frances Haugen told the British parliament, Reuters writes. According to Haugen the social network follows a start-up culture where cutting corners was a good thing and said it was "unquestionably" making hate worse.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has "welcomed" comments by eight out of the 10 embassies whose envoys he threatened to expel they would abide by the Vienna Convention on non-interference in internal affairs. The statements by Canada, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden were a "step back", pro-Erdoğan media added. France and Germany said nothing. The 10 ambassadors earlier called for justice for a jailed Turkish philanthropist.

Poland is raising the number of soldiers on its Belarus border from 6,000 to "about 10,000" to stop Middle East migrants being flown in by the Minsk regime, Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Monday. Two border guards were temporarily hospitalised over the weekend when a group of 60 to 70 asylum-seekers tried to storm a barbed-wire fence. One guard was hit in the face with a stone, Poland said.