Author: staff

“I am firmly convinced that Friedrich Merz will remain chancellor,” Markus Söder, the powerful state premier of Bavaria and CSU leader, said in an interview with public broadcaster ARD over the weekend.  “It would throw the conservatives into complete disarray,” Söder said of a potential swap. “Moreover, it could even lead to new elections. And anyone who wants new elections now — in a situation like this, after such a lead-up — is only promoting one thing: bringing radicals to power. That is why my urgent advice is to focus on the work at hand and spend less time speculating behind the…

Many in Madrid expressed fears Washington could decline to rein in Rabat, and pointed to a recent U.S. Congress report that described Ceuta and Melilla as being in “Moroccan territory” and was supportive of negotiations on the “future status” of the cities. But U.S. State Department Spokesperson Tommy Pigott insisted that there has been no change in U.S. policy on the exclaves. “The United States unequivocally supports Spain’s sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla,” he told POLITICO. The State Department noted that the congressional report did not represent U.S. law. Pigott said that allegations suggesting Washington was questioning Spain’s continued control…

Published on 06/08/2026 – 10:14 GMT+2 Ukraine struck two Russian oil refineries hundreds of kilometres from the border in an overnight attack, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday, as Russia hit a train station and commercial ship in Ukraine. Both sides have been intensifying their long-range attacks in recent months, leading to a jump in civilian deaths. Kyiv has been firing record numbers of drones at Russia, while Moscow has been launching all-time high missile attacks. Zelenskyy said Ukraine had hit oil refineries in the Bashkortostan and Yaroslavl regions, about 700 kilometres from the front. The attacks were “strengthening the…

Published on 06/08/2026 – 22:02 GMT+2 Washington will fork out $1.22 billion (€1.06 billion) to German energy firm RWE to cancel the company’s offshore wind leases. RWE said on Thursday that it had reached a settlement with the US Department of the Interior (DOI) to relinquish leases off the coasts of New York, California, and Louisiana. “After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future,” the company said in a statement. Trump vs wind energy US President Donald Trump, long a critic of wind energy, has embarked…

Starmer faced a tricky 2025 after winning a landslide victory the previous year, which brought the center-left party back into power after 14 years. He was forced into a series of policy U-turns by his party, and sacked Peter Mandelson as U.K. ambassador to the U.S. after fresh details on the closeness of his friendship with convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein emerged. Membership swelled under Starmer’s predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, with the party recording more than half a million Labour members at the peak of his popularity. But under Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves, the party moved rightwards economically and on issues such…

Published on 06/08/2026 – 10:24 GMT+2•Updated 10:46 Hungary’s Prime Minister Péter Magyar says he is optimistic that the Paks nuclear power station will be able to restart soon as water levels on the Danube slowly rise. Hungary shut down its sole nuclear power plant, which relies on the waters of the Danube for cooling, on Sunday because of low water levels. The waters of the Danube, Europe’s second longest river, have dropped in parts to a record low due to successive heatwaves that have parched the continent since May. “The good news is that we are now nine centimetres above…

“We must cooperate with our neighbors, of course. But as long as control depends on the goodwill of one neighboring state, we remain … vulnerable,” he added. Brunner described last week’s events in Ceuta, when around 72,000 migrants forced their way into the Spanish exclave, as “solid proof that we need a strong and effective tool — and different tools — to combat smuggling.” Ceuta Mayor-President Juan Jesús Vivas, who also attended the meeting, said that around 100 people died during the mass border crossing, and that between 3,000 and 5,000 remained in the exclave. Brunner said the EU should use…

Published on 06/08/2026 – 18:17 GMT+2•Updated 19:18 The Ministry of Information of Belarus has designated Euronews’ website as “extremist” media, adding it to its “Republican List of Extremist Materials” following a national court order, according to Belarus-based media outlets. The Euronews website will now be restricted in Belarus, and readers could face administrative penalties for “storing or distributing” its content, after many years in which Euronews has been the main European source of information in the country, according to Euronews’ audience data in Belarus. The state decision was taken by the Horki District Court in the Mogilev Region on 4…

Published on 06/08/2026 – 18:07 GMT+2 European football governing body UEFA has threatened to go ahead with a boycott of FIFA events despite FIFA offering an apology over its handling of a proposed private investment plan. In a statement on Thursday, UEFA said: “UEFA’s associations were very clear about the conditions attached to the non-participation in FIFA competitions.” “First, the proposals to sell off the major competitions had to be withdrawn and secondly, assurances have to be made that such attempts to disfigure the game in this way will never be made again,” it continued, adding: “These conditions have not…

Images and videos of mass migration into Ceuta, which borders Morocco, quickly spread across social media after tens of thousands of migrants rushed into the Spanish territory last week. Mixed in with genuine reports about the crisis, which saw roughly 72,000 people from Morocco cross into Ceuta, was a wave of misleading visuals, including AI-generated images presented as authentic news photographs and recycled videos falsely linked to the crossings. One example is this dramatic image purportedly showing a “soldier” raising a large rock above a migrant climbing an embankment, which was shared on YouTube, X and Reddit. The photograph was…