Euobserver.com

German economy minister Robert Habeck said he would not consider extending the lifetime of the country's last three remaining nuclear power plants to save gas.

Asylum proceedings are one of the biggest issues with the EU's migration policy, and digital identification through blockchain to register and track refugees would be an instrumental step towards the level of necessary reform.

Chinese troops will train side-by-side with Russian troops in one of Moscow's most important military exercises to date. China's ministry of defence announced its armed forces will take part in the Vostok 2022 strategic exercises, which will also include soldiers from India, Belarus, Tajikistan and Mongolia, and will take place from 30 August to 5 September in Russia.

The annual inflation rate in the 19-country Eurozone was 8.9 percent in July, with high energy prices and food contributing the most to the overall inflation rate, at 4.02 and 2.08 percent, respectively.

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres has warned that potential damage to the nuclear power plant Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine would be "suicide", after he and the presidents of Turkey and Ukraine discussed the issue on Thursday. Ukraine president Volodomyr Zelensky agreed terms for a visit by the International Atomic Energy Authority to the plant.

Nato-member Denmark is set to spend around €5.5bn on new warships. Denmark's defence ministry on Thursday said it aimed to build the new warships in the country. "With Russia's attack on Ukraine and the new security situation in Europe, it is more important than ever that Denmark is able to defend itself. Security of supply plays a decisive role here," said defence minister Morten Bodskov.

The German economy stagnated in the second quarter of 2022, the monthly report for August from the country's finance ministry said, according to Reuters. The gloomy figures cited the Ukraine war, rocketing energy prices, the pandemic and supply disruptions. "The outlook for the further development (of the economy) is currently noticeably gloomy," the report stated. It also noted a "high degree of uncertainty" in future predictions.

Ukraine's ambassador to Lebanon on Thursday said Syria had received a Russian ship delivering stolen Ukrainian grain. "According to our information, the SV KONSTANTIN docked in Syria," the Ukrainian embassy reported to AFP in Beirut, "with on board grain stolen and illegally transported by the Russian occupation forces."

Liz Truss is leading in the polls to become the next prime minister of the United Kingdom. The YouGov/Sky News poll, published on Thursday, shows Truss with a 32-point lead over rival contender Rishi Sunak. Some 66 percent of the conservative party members back her, as opposed to 34 percent for Sunak. The same poll two weeks ago gave her a 38-point lead. The result is due in September.

Serbia's president Aleksandar Vučić and Kosovo's prime minster Albin Kurti met in Brussels with the EU's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, in the hopes of finding a solution the recent spike in tensions between the two sides.

Russian state nuclear operator responds to the opinion piece titled "How scary is threat to Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant?"

The former Soviet states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan have retained close ties with Russia since 1989. Yet this consensus may be shifting. At the UN, none of them supported Russia in the resolution condemning the Ukraine invasion.

Ukrainian forces said on Thursday they had beaten back a Russian attack in the southern region of Kherson, ahead of a meeting with UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan later on Thursday in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. "Russian forces have achieved only minimal advances, and in some cases we have advanced, since last month," Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said in a video.

German chancellor Olaf Scholz faces lawmakers' questions on Friday over his role in tackling a multibillion-euro tax fraud. The sprawling probe, known as "cum-ex" or dividend-stripping, investigates banks and investors who traded shares around their dividend payout day, blurring stock ownership and allowing multiple parties to falsely reclaim tax rebates on dividends. The loophole, now closed, has snowballed into a political scandal.

The eurozone inflation outlook has failed to improve since a July rate-hike, European Central Bank board member Isabel Schnabel said in an interview with Reuters, suggesting she favours another large interest rate increase next month even as recession risks harden. The central bank surprised investors with a 50-basis-point rate hike last month fearing that inflation, now approaching double-digit territory, was at risk of getting entrenched.

Mali's foreign affairs minister, Abdoulaye Diop, has accused the French military command of breaching Malian airspace to collect information and drop arms and ammunition to Islamist militants, in a letter to the UN. Diop provided no evidence to show that France had supplied arms. France has spent a decade and billions of dollars stamping out Islamist militants, some with links to al Qaeda and Islamic State, in its former colony.

Norway's sovereign wealth fund made a record loss of €171bn in the first half of 2022. The decline of the €1.3 trillion fund was led by a 28-percent drop in the value of its technology stocks. "The market has been characterised by rising interest rates, high inflation, and war in Europe," chief executive Nicolai Tangen of Norges Bank Investment Management, which operates the fund, said in a statement.

Germany is likely to miss a November target for gas-storage levels set by the government to avoid an energy crisis, the head of the Bundesnetzagentur energy regulator told German media outlet t-online on Thursday. The country has already hit its first target for gas storage facilities to be 75 percent full by 1 September. The next goals are 85 percent by 1 October and 95 percent by 1 November.

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres will meet Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ukraine on Thursday, with grain exports and concerns about the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant topping the agenda. Guterres, who arrived in Lviv on Wednesday, plans on Friday to visit the Black Sea port of Odessa, where grain exports have resumed under a UN-brokered deal aimed at easing a worsening global food crisis.

German utility company Uniper reported a €12.3bn first-half loss, saying it had been pushed to the "brink of insolvency" by a huge drop in Russian gas deliveries. The loss by Europe's biggest importer of Russian gas is one of the largest by a German company, eclipsing Bayer's €10.5bn loss in 2020. Uniper chief executive Klaus-Dieter Maubach warned on Wednesday that Europe faced a grim energy outlook this winter.