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Slovak Agriculture Minister Richard Takáč is keeping quiet about his meeting with European Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski over the delayed release of EU farm subsidies, known as direct payments, which the Slovak government has still not paid to all eligible Slovak farmers, putting them at risk of not receiving them.

In today's episode of Today in the EU, we decrypt the 147-page long report by former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta that all EU institutions have been waiting for. Letta's analysis of the EU's single market was commissioned by the European Council a year ago.

European Council president Charles Michel described EU leaders' competitiveness summit as “difficult” - as calls for harmonising corporate tax rules and centralising the supervision of financial sector firms were scrapped from the final Council conclusions.

“What I am very pleased to hear is that the Hungarian presidency was very clear in the fact that they take this as one of the key elements of their presidency,” Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo said on Thursday (18 April).

The UN’s Summit of the Future takes place on 22-23 September in New York, hosted by the UN General Assembly. It provides a high-level forum to determine the next steps in achieving all 17 sustainable development goals.

Kazakhstan will guarantee better protection of women’s rights and children’s safety. Kazakh President, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, has endorsed significant amendments to new laws envisaging harsh penalties for perpetrators of abuse.

Despite boasting IT specialisation, Romania struggles with one of the most underdeveloped digital public bureaucracies in the region. A new €6 billion injection from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan could revitalise the sector.

Spain's Ministry of Health is to include in its national epidemiological surveillance system a state register in which any suspicion of work-related mental suffering will be reported, because “work is breaking workers”, Belén González, the coordinator of this pioneering initiative, told Euractiv's partner EFE in an interview.

European leaders lack the “fire of urgency” of Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta - authors of two strategic reports on the EU's future - and are being driven by “political expediency”, the co-president of the Greens/EFA European Parliamentary group, Philippe Lamberts, warned on Thursday.

A report published on Thursday (18 April) by several European NGOs shows that stopping the export of banned pesticides to Europe would have minimal economic effects, and calls on the EU to put a stop to it.

Amid fears that the EU will miss its target of 25% organic agriculture by 2030, stakeholders are calling for a more favourable policy framework to boost demand for organic products.

Even though the latest cloud scheme allows for sovereignty requirements, France appears to be pushing back on the grounds that it will lead to market fragmentation.

France has invited Russia to the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, an event that changed the course of World War Two. “Given the circumstances,” the organisers said, President Vladimir Putin is not invited but another figure, to be announced later, will represent Russia on 6 June.

While debates about farming and heat pumps have brought some climate policy debates to a standstill in Brussels, new public opinion research shows how action on aviation could represent a new way forward for climate and the EU, writes Ed Hodgson

The European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL) calls on the EU to accelerate public health policies to reduce liver diseases, improve quality of life, and save significant costs.

With less than two months before June’s EU elections, the hard right ECR party - possibly seeing the electoral train passing them by - has woken up and is edging closer towards appointing their own Spitzenkandidat, a concept they previously rejected.

The EU Commission has given 24 hours for TikTok to provide a risk evaluation of the lighter version of its app, which the executive says should have been conducted prior to the app's launch in France and Spain in April

The world should ensure diverse supply chains and implement a framework to track the progress made towards tripling global renewable capacity by 2030, the EU's Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson said in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday (17 April). 

South Africa, the world’s second-largest citrus exporter in the world after Spain, has launched a dispute at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) over the EU’s phytosanitary trade rules, which it said were not justified or appropriate.

On Tuesday, the French government unveiled the list of the first 55 sites available in France to host decarbonization industries.