Eurotopics.net

Things are not looking good for tech giant Facebook. Several of the company's service were offline for hours on Monday evening due to a massive outage. Instagram and WhatsApp were also affected. Then on Tuesday, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen made serious accusations against the company before the US Congress. Europe's media stress the need to review security on the Internet.

Representatives of the European Union and the Western Balkan states are meeting in Slovenia today to discuss, among other issues, EU enlargement. But since the member states have not been able to agree on a concrete accession date for Serbia, Albania or northern Macedonia and have only pledged investment aid amounting to nine billion euros there is a lot of frustration and disappointment in the media.

In Romania, the centre-right government of Florin Cîțu (PNL) has been ousted following a no-confidence vote initiated by the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and supported by the liberal Union to Save Romania party (USR-Plus), which had been thrown out of the governing coalition, and the right-wing nationalist AUR. Since it is not clear which parties could form a governing majority, commentators fear a long period of uncertainty - in the midst of the fourth wave of the pandemic.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš has also been implicated in the offshore transactions scandal. He allegedly acquired a property on the Côte d'Azur via shell companies over ten years ago. The press discusses the potential impact on his image and this weekend's parliamentary elections.

The Pandora Papers are showing once again how politicians, oligarchs and celebrities around the world use tax havens for secret transactions. The large-scale investigation has revealed that leading politicians such as Czech Prime Minister Babiš, Ukrainian President Zelensky and British ex-prime minister Tony Blair used such structures. Although their actions may be reprehensible, pointing the finger won't solve the problem, commentators admonish.