Euobserver.com

This month, three Swedish women landed in Stockholm, expelled from Syria together with their children. Two of the women were arrested, one suspected of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Their children were immediately taken into custody.

Brussels is feeling the Mario Draghi effect, too. After the German elections, this former president of the European Central Bank will become the European Council's most institutionally-experienced member.

The European Commission has demanded Warsaw "ensure that people at the border are given the necessary care and assistance". But activists say without any help, more stranded people along the Polish-Belarus border will likely die as temperatures plummet.

Italian police arrested Catalan independence leader and MEP Carles Puigdemont at an airport in Sardinia on Thursday, where he is to appear in court on Friday and could be extradited to Spain, which is hunting him for "sedition". Catalonia's president Pere Aragones condemned what he called Puigdemont's "persecution and judicial repression". Puigdemont has lived in Belgium since 2017, but was stripped of his European Parliament immunity in March this year.

EU and US trade officials will meet for talks 29 September as planned, the European Commission said Thursday, after the meeting had been thrown into doubt because of French anger over a controversial US defence deal with Australia. "The Commission confirms that the Trade and Technology Council will take place," it said. "Strategic alliances are about shaping common approaches and also overcoming difficulties," EU trade commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis tweeted.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) will likely decide in early October whether to endorse a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, to be given half a year after the initial two-shot course, Reuters writes. "The outcome of this evaluation is expected in early October, unless supplementary information is needed," the EMA head of vaccines strategy, Marco Cavaleri, told a press briefing on Thursday.

The EU Commission has cautiously welcomed Poland's decision to temporarily extend the licence of TVN24, the country's leading independent broadcaster. "We will continue to closely monitor the situation," a commission spokesman said Thursday, following a decision by Polish regulator KRRiT one day earlier. TVN24, which is US-owned, had fallen foul of new rules on foreign media ownership. And the commission repeated its long-standing worries over media pluralism in Poland Thursday.

Ukraine's parliament passed a law on Thursday to order oligarchs to register and stay out of politics, a day after an attempt to kill a top aide to president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, which officials said could have been a response to the reform, Reuters writes. Such oligarchs would be forbidden from financing political parties or taking part in privatisations. Top officials would be required to declare dealings they had with them.

The European Commission could withhold funds from Poland's EU budget pot in event of non-payment of a €500,000-a-day EU court fine over a highly-polluting coal mine, it said on Thursday. "If payment [of the fine] is not executed [in due time] ... the fine is to be recovered by deductions from [budget] payments due to the given member state," the commission press service told Polish news website Onet.pl.

The EU and US plan to unveil joint curbs on the market and political power of tech-giants, such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google, at trade talks in Pittsburgh 29 September, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters. The memo "identified common issues of concern around gatekeeper power by major platforms," adding: "This includes ... responsibility of online intermediaries to safeguard democratic processes from the impact of business activities".

EU states, 37 MEPs and the European Commission signed a transparency pledge, published on Thursday. "Each and every one of us pledges to take steps to ensure that the EU's decision-making process becomes more open," they said as part of a wider public debate as part of the Conference on the Future of Europe.

The European Commission unveiled its plans to make USB-C the standard charging port for all smartphones, tablets, and other small electronic devices.

The central European leaders signed a joint declaration saying "increasing the number of European children is essential to preserving Europe's Christian culture and other religious traditions for future generations."

Yemen hosts around 130,000 refugees and 12,000 asylum seekers. In a country wrecked by six years of war, many find themselves in dire conditions and unable to leave, says Jean-Nicolas Beuze, the UN refugee agency's representative in Yemen.

Volkswagen used software to alter emissions illegally, according to the European advocate-general on Thursday. The German carmaker installed devices that could detect when the car would be subjected to testing - which would then distort parameters to show lower emissions.

Looking at the historical record, a clear picture emerges: the president of the European Parliament is an above-middle aged white man, most likely German — and with an overwhelming likelyhood to be conservative or socialist.

Russia invited even more French VIPs than previously reported to whitewash its dirty elections last weekend.

The US and French presidents have moved to mend ties, with France agreeing to send its ambassador back to Washington and the White House acknowledging it erred in brokering a deal for Australia to buy US instead of French submarines without consulting Paris, Reuters reports. In a joint statement the two leaders agreed to launch in-depth consultations to rebuild trust, and to meet in Europe at the end of October.

Europe should be able to launch military operations overseas without US or Nato help in future, the EU's top diplomat, Josep Borrell, told US broadcaster PBS in New York Wednesday. "So there will be problems in our neighbourhood in which you [the US] will not intervene, and we should be able to do that on our own," he said, amid a renewed French push to create an EU army.

The Polish region of Swietokrzyskie has voted to abandon an anti-LGBTIQ declaration from 2019, Reuters reports, after the EU threatened to withhold pandemic-recovery funding. The local government, on Wednesday, also said it was against "all manifestations of discrimination based on sex, age, race, disability, ethnic origin religion, belief or [sexual] orientation". The declaration, like dozens of others adopted in Polish regions, had declared the area an "LGBTI ideology-free zone".