Author: staff

Stay true to culture. This is the challenge set by a new international initiative which unites around 30 European musicians demanding the regulation of Artificial Intelligence and the protection of copyright. The campaign, entitled #StayTrueToTheAct, includes 17 Portuguese artists and seeks to sensitise European policymakers “to the urgency of ensuring that AI systems respect intellectual property rules”. The movement is based on the creation and dissemination of video messages by musicians from all over Europe, who are calling on the European Commission to legislate to hold AI companies accountable for the way they use copyrighted material to train their models.…

On Monday, however, the Reggia di Caserta canceled the event. The decision came amid mounting criticism from Italian politicians, MEPs, and Ukrainian and anti-Kremlin activists, who condemned Gergiev’s well-documented support for warmongering Russian President Vladimir Putin. “He is not just a simple conductor, as some continue to claim. He is a figure entirely embedded in the Kremlin’s criminal regime, he’s a pawn of that regime, a sort of personal ambassador of Putin in the world of culture,” European Parliament Vice President Pina Picierno, a member of Italy’s center-left Democratic Party (PD), told POLITICO. “This guy has no right to have…

Published on 23/07/2025 – 15:00 GMT+2 •Updated 15:24 A good example of the current dilemmas the Schengen Treaty is facing is to be found along the German/Polish border on the border town of Görlitz (Germany) and Zgorzelec (Poland), merely divided by the river Lusatian Neisse.  In 2023, citing its ongoing fight against illegal migration, Germany imposed temporary here as everywhere along its border with Poland. In turn, Polish authorities imposed temporary controls from July 7, 2025. Locals on both sides of the border are suffering the consequences, including huge traffic jams.   Take for instance 37-year-old data analyst Jakub Woliński. He…

Published on 23/07/2025 – 15:37 GMT+2 Two people have died and two others have been seriously injured in a shooting in Northern Ireland, police said on Wednesday. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said that there was no ongoing risk to the public from the shooting outside the village of Maguiresbridge in County Fermanagh, located about 120 kilometres southwest of Belfast. Police and paramedics were called to an address in the village after 7 am local time on Wednesday morning. The injured victims were being treated in two hospitals for serious injuries, the ambulance service said. The PSNI has…

More than 100 pieces of content published on X from Russian state media and disinformation actors that fail to comply with European rules still appear on the social media platform despite being reported to X, according to a new report.  The report commissioned by German non-profit group WeMove Europe, which was shared exclusively with Euronews, found “125 clear sanction-violating posts” on the Elon Musk-owned platform. Some of the posts included programmes from the Russian state broadcaster Russia Today (RT), which has been banned by the European Union since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.  In one instance, the Russian Ministry of…

Bodnar had come under fire for the slow pace of fixing the judiciary after the previous Law and Justice (PiS) party government and prosecuting former officials facing allegations of abuse of power and corruption. This became a major cause of frustration for supporters of Tusk’s four-party coalition, which won power in late 2023. The sense that the government was adrift was one of the factors that led to the defeat of Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, the candidate of Tusk’s Civic Platform party in the presidential election, to PiS-backed Karol Nawrocki, a right-wing hardliner. “The time of post-election trauma ends today,”…

More than 100 non-governmental organisations warned of the risk of mass starvation in Gaza on Wednesday, sounding the alarm to allow life-saving food and aid into the Strip. In a joint statement, prominent organisations including Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International and Oxfam said that as supplies are totally depleted and mass starvation is spreading across the enclave, adding “humanitarian organisations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes.” The humanitarian organisations point out that food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items and fuel sit untouched just outside, or in some cases inside Gaza, in warehouses. “The…

BRUSSELS — The EU will merge two packages of retaliation measures against U.S. tariffs into a single one that will be ready to use if trade negotiations with the Trump administration go sour, a European Commission spokesperson said Wednesday. “To make our countermeasures clearer, simpler, and stronger, we will merge lists 1 & 2 into a single list,” the bloc’s spokesperson for trade Olof Gill told journalists. The first list is currently paused until Aug. 6 and the second awaits a vote by the EU’s 27 member countries. The combined list would target €93 billion of U.S. imports into the EU…

The Ukrainian parliament passed on Tuesday a controversial bill that effectively eliminates the independence of the country’s anti-corruption institutions. The 12414 bill subordinates the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) to Ukraine’s prosecutor general.  Activists had urged Ukrainian lawmakers to vote against the bill before the vote, warning that it would make it impossible for the anti-corruption agencies to investigate senior officials without approval from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration. But despite the civil society calls and pressure, the Verkhovna Rada passed the bill, triggering the first protests in Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale…

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday approved a law that placed previously independent anti-corruption agencies under executive control. The reforms, the latest move by the presidential office to consolidate power within a circle of loyalists, have critics fearing Zelenskyy and his team could abuse their special wartime authority. Hundreds protested in central Kyiv and other cities around Ukraine on Tuesday for the first time since Russian leader Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion in February 2022, upset by the move to ram through the legislation. POLITICO breaks down what the fight is about: What’s in the anti-corruption legislation? The new…