Euobserver.com

A group of digital rights organisations on Thursday filed legal complaints against the company Clearview AI -which uses facial-recognition to have "the largest known database of 3+ billion facial images". The company previously offered its product to law enforcement and private companies in various countries, according to The New York Times. The complaints were submitted to data protection regulators in France, Austria, Italy, Greece and the UK.

EU policy is partly to blame for rising migrant fatalities in the Mediterranean, the UN said in a report on Wednesday. Inadequate search-and-rescue was "not a tragic anomaly, but rather a consequence of concrete policy decisions and practices by the Libyan authorities [and] European Union member states and institutions," it said. "So much of the suffering and death along the central Mediterranean route is preventable," a UN official said.

EU lawyers asked a Brussels court on Wednesday to impose a €10m fine on the British-Swedish pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca over delays in delivering Covid-19 vaccines, Reuters reported. The EU is also seeking €10 per dose for each day of delay as compensation for breaching contractual obligations. The bloc has demanded 90m doses from AstraZeneca by the end of June. A verdict is expected before the end of June.

Hungarian MPs overwhelmingly ratified an EU fund for post-pandemic economic recovery in a vote on Wednesday, paving the way for €750bn in joint European borrowing and spending in coming years. Austria, Poland, and Romania are still to do so. But Hungary had been a potential stumbling block, amid an EU clash with its nationalist-populist regime on rule of law, and Budapest's frequent use of EU vetoes to force concessions.

France should lobby Europe for a speedy ratification of the EU-China investment treaty despite the sanctions dispute, Chinese commerce minister Wang Wentao urged his French counterpart Franck Riester in talks this week, the Chinese ministry said Wednesday. He spoke after the European Parliament froze ratification of the agreement, due to Chinese sanctions on MEPs and EU officials - imposed in retaliation against EU sanctions on Chinese human rights abuses.

The UK should clean its banks of corrupt money linked to the Belarusian and Russian regimes, Estonian president Kersti Kaljulaid told BBC Radio Wednesday. "We were not very shy here in Estonia ... to point out that there is a lot of [this] money in your own country," she said, adding "[be] the strongest you can be, considering this money is siphoned off from the suffering of the Belarusian people".

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko said he acted "legally" in diverting a Ryanair flight with a dissident onboard and slammed the West for "crossing red lines," The Moscow Times writes. "Don't blame me. I was acting legally to protect my people. That's how it will continue to be," Lukashenko said. The Kremlin said it saw no reason not to trust his statements.

The Belgian government has halted vaccinations with the Johnson & Johnson jab for people younger than 41, after one woman died of a complication, De Standaard writes. The Slovenian woman, who was under 40 and the wife of a diplomat, died from a rare thrombosis after her vaccination with the Johnson & Johnson jab, outside the official Belgian vaccination programme. She received the vaccine through the embassy.

The European Commission has introduced beefed-up rules tackling disinformation. Although the code is voluntary, it is set to be embedded into the Digital Services Act, where sanctions could be imposed.

A Dutch court ruled that energy giant Shell must reduce CO2 emissions by 45 percent by 2030, and push its subsidiaries to do the same. This is the first time an oil company is being held liable for climate change.

The Czech government has lost its fourth health minister during the Covid crisis. But it's new (fifth) one, was actually also the first - making a total of four.

A jab-in-the-arm rather than a bite-to-the-neck is what visitors get if they choose to vaccinate in one of Romania's most famous tourist attractions.

Progress at the Union for the Mediterranean has been slow and remains below its potential. The EU is still responsible for over 95 percent of the region's internal merchandise exports and 93 percent of the external merchandise exports.

The European Commission has said it regretted Switzerland's decision to terminate the negotiations of the EU-Swiss framework agreement. The agreement was aiming to "ensure that anyone operating in the EU single market , to which Switzerland has significant access, faces the same conditions," the commission noted, adding that "without this agreement this modernisation of our relationship will not be possible."

The European Commission has narrowed the scope of a probe into how German carmakers VW and BMW colluded to block the roll-out of clean-air technology, meaning they are likely to face lower fines, Reuters reports, citing an EU source. The probe will look at catalytic reduction systems only, not particulate filters for petrol cars as well. VW and BMW lost billions for cheating on diesel-pollution tests in a separate case.

Front-Lex, a Dutch-based group, has launched legal action against EU border control agency Frontex at the EU Court of Justice over alleged mistreatment of a Burundi woman and Congelese teenager. They "were violently rounded up ... [and] forcibly transferred back to sea," it said. "It's an activist agenda pretending to be a legal case, whose aim is to undermine the EU's resolve to protect its borders," a Frontex spokesman said.

The US, UK, France, Germany and Italy released a statement calling Syria's presidential elections on Wednesday as neither "free nor fair," Deutsche Welle reports. The Western nations claimed the elections were a fraud orchestrated by incumbent president Bashar Al-Assad. In order to run for president, candidates must be at least 40 years old and are barred from office if they are convicted of a crime.

The EU needs a new strategy on Russia because sanctions alone have not changed its behaviour, French president Emmanuel Macron has said.

An Italian judge ordered four senior members of Egypt's security services to stand trial over their suspected role in the disappearance and murder of student Giulio Regeni in Cairo in 2016, Reuters reports. Regeni, a postgraduate student at Cambridge University, UK, disappeared in the Egyptian capital in January 2016. His body was found almost a week later and a post mortem examination showed he had been tortured before his death.

A Russia-linked PR firm called Fazze offered to pay social-media influencers in France and Italy to tell followers the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine had caused mass deaths unreported by mainstream media, The Guardian reports. Léo Grasset, a French blogger with 1.2 million followers, said the campaign had a "colossal budget". Influencers were meant to post links to 'leaked data' on deaths, even though no such leaked data existed.