Author: staff

The president of the conservative European People’s Party (EPP), the European Parliament’s largest group, said he feels privileged to be targeted in a current billboard campaign of the Hungarian government.The Hungarian government is encouraging citizens to vote in a national consultation over the bid of Ukraine for accession to the EU. Viktor Orbán’s government favours blocking Kyiv’s accession considering it harmful to the EU and the Hungarian economy.The billboards are designed to encourage people to vote and show pictures of EPP president Manfred Weber, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen together with Ukrainian president Volodimir Zelenskyy under the slogan:…

The powerful sister of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un has mocked Washington and its Asian allies for what she called their “daydream” of denuclearising the North, insisting that the country will never give up its nuclear weapons programme.The statement by Kim Yo-jong, one of the country’s top foreign policy officials, was in response to a meeting last week between top diplomats of the US, South Korea and Japan where they reaffirmed their commitment to push for the Pyongyang’s denuclearisation.Noting that North Korea’s goals for nuclear weapons expansion are enshrined in its constitution, she insisted that any external discussions of denuclearisation constitute…

The British government has refused to rule out nationalising the last plant in the UK that makes steel from raw materials as the global trade war increases pressure to preserve the nation’s ability to supply domestic industry with the steel it needs.The Scunthorpe steel works operated by British Steel may soon run out of the iron pellets used to produce steel in two massive blast furnaces unless the government steps in, according to local politicians and unions. That’s because the plant’s owner, China’s Jingye Group, cancelled orders for these essential raw materials amid negotiations for increased government support.The news comes…

A new levy on shipping emissions is on the cusp of being approved at talks in London this week. If implemented, it would be the world’s first-ever global carbon tax. Responsible for a growing share of global CO2 emissions, shipping has been one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise. The international nature of the industry has made it difficult to align with national climate goals, so a global carbon pricing model is widely seen as the most effective mechanism for regulation.If adopted, a robust pricing mechanism that covers the global shipping industry would be considered one of the most important climate agreements…

Online platforms TikTok, Meta, Google and X have been invited to take part in an election stress test on Thursday organised by the Romanian communications regulator Ancom, ahead of the first round of the new presidential election on 4 May, after the November election was annulled. The exercise aims to test the capacity of those involved in the electoral process and to address potential online challenges that may arise during the election period, Ancom told Euronews. Representatives of the European Commission, national authorities and civil society organisations were also invited. The Commission confirmed to Euronews that it will take part in the stress…

So far, Brussels has approved limited sanctions against extremist Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. But it has resisted calls for more restrictive measures or suspending trade ties with Israel following the launch of its war on Gaza in 2023 after Hamas militants attacked Israel and took hostages to the coastal enclave. Adra, whose documentary tells the story of Israeli demolitions of his native rural community of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, argues the EU should “at the minimum recognize now the state of Palestine” but also sanction “all settlers [who] are violating international law.”…

Researchers in Denmark have set a new world record in efficiency for converting sunlight into electricity by using new windows that allow light to pass through while simultaneously generating power. The transparent solar cell technology could provide a breakthrough for renewable energy by transforming skyscrapers and offices into power plants, using their windows to become solar panels. The innovation from the CitySolar project could also help Europe meet its ambitions to make all new buildings nearly zero energy and fully decarbonise the European building sector by 2050.The researchers from the University of Southern Denmark combined organic solar cells with the material perovskite,…

The retaliation does not yet respond to Trump’s imposition of 20 percent “reciprocal” tariffs on all EU exports, which came into force on Wednesday, and his latest 25 percent tariff on cars. Trump has also said tariffs on pharmaceuticals are coming soon. The European Commission is considering putting forward its countermeasures on those tariffs as early as next week. “It will for sure be soon. I expect it could be as early as next week,” trade spokesperson Olof Gill said Tuesday. Trump demands that the EU reduce its trade surplus with the U.S., for instance by buying unrealistic amounts of…

Germany’s steel giant ThyssenKrupp wants to cut 11,000 jobs. Europe’s metal industry is in crisis. US tariffs, exorbitant energy prices, global overcapacity, competition from cheap steel from China… The European Commission is trying to save what can be saved – with a ‘Steel Action Plan’. The European Commission calls its strategy for industrial competitiveness and decarbonisation the ‘Clean Industrial Deal’. Far too much steel is produced worldwide. And now the new US government is also threatening tariffs: 25 percent on all steel and aluminium imports. As a result, there is a risk of international trade flows being diverted away from the…

How can we stop artificial intelligence (AI) from stealing our content? US-based web services provider Cloudflare says it has come up with a solution to web scraping – by setting up an “AI labyrinth” to trap bots.More specifically, this maze is aimed at detecting “AI crawlers,” bots that systematically mine data from web pages’ content and trap them there. The company said in a blog post published last week that it has seen “an explosion of new crawlers used by AI companies to scrape data for model training”.Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) requires enormous databases for training its models. Several tech companies…