Euobserver.com

Hungary's central bank raised one of its main interest rates by 200 basis points to 9.75 per cent on Thursday. The move follows a 5 per cent fall in the currency against the euro over the past week. Budapest has been at odds with the EU Commission over its rule of law record and Brussels has held back pandemic loans worth more than €15bn.

An advisor to the EU court in Luxembourg has said Italian authorities can force US property-rental firm Airbnb to give up data to national tax authorities. The firm recently lost a similar case in Belgian courts, in a challenge to its business model in Europe. "Airbnb wants to be a good partner on tax," it said. The EU court advisor's opinion is not binding, but most verdicts follow suit.

Turkey has let free a Russian-flagged ship Ukraine said was full of stolen grain, prompting Kyiv to summon Turkey's ambassador to clarify what happened, Reuters reports. "We regret that Russia's ship Zhibek Zholy, which was full of stolen Ukrainian grain, was allowed to leave Karasu port, despite criminal evidence presented to the Turkish authorities," Ukraine's foreign ministry said. The Turkish decision was "unacceptable" it added.

Finnish MPs have passed a law to strengthen barriers on the country's 1,300km-long border with Russia, currently composed of wooden fences designed to keep farm animals from wandering. "In all likelihood the fence will not cover the entire eastern border but will be targeted at locations considered to be the most important", Sanna Palo, director of the Finnish border guards' legal division told The Guardian. Finland is also joining Nato.

Ukraine has arrested a gang-leader in Kyiv charged with trafficking refugee women via Europe to Turkey for prostitution after giving them fake promises of other jobs, The Guardian reports. One 21-year old woman was to be moved via Hungary and Austria to Istanbul. "Her vulnerable condition was clear: absence of money, a child to support," Oleh Tkalenko, a Ukrainian prosecutor said. Some women may have been trafficked to EU destinations.

Irish taoiseach Michael Martin has urged outgoing British prime minister Boris Johnson to rethink plans by the British government to override the protocol governing Northern Irish trade under Brexit. Martin said London-Dublin relations had been "strained and challenged" and urged a "pulling back from unilateral action, whether that be on dealing with the legacy of the past, human rights, or the Northern Ireland protocol."

The European Parliament has called to include the right to legal and safe abortion into the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, following the critical ruling overturning abortion rights in the US.

French journalist Guy Lagache spent the first six months of this year in close proximity to Emmanuel Macron, making a film that ended up focusing on the French president's Putin strategy.

Belgium is reopening its embassy in Kyiv on Monday, its foreign ministry told EUobserver, but consular matters will still be handled by staff who had relocated to Poland. Belgium closed its embassy on 1 March one week after Russia's invasion. Kyiv is still sometimes being hit by Russian missiles, but with fighting now concentrated in eastern Ukraine, several EU countries and the US have returned to Kyiv out of solidarity.

European lawmakers from across different political factions sought to distance or deny any links to the Kremlin regime in a Strasbourg debate on Russian influence.

British prime minister Boris Johnson has resigned as Conservative party leader, starting a race among Conservative MPs to replace him as prime minister but leaving a range of issues — Brexit, Northern Ireland, and Scottish independence — for his successor.

Danish ministers and officials are no longer allowed to delete work-related text messages on service phones, under new guidelines presented by justice minister Mattias Tesfaye on Thursday. To date, text messages were not stored centrally, as is the case for emails. The loss of text messages exchanged between EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and the boss of pharmaceutical company Pfizer was recently criticised by the EU ombudsman.

British prime minister Boris Johnson will resign later on Thursday, according to the BBC, with a Downing Street spokesman saying Johnson will make an "address to the country" later in the day. Johnson has been hit by dozens of ministerial resignations within 48 hours, following his handling of sexual assault allegations against a Conservative MP, and in the wake of the 'partygate' scandal of social gatherings during the Covid lockdowns.

British prime minister Boris Johnson has vowed to stay on despite more than 40 resignations from government, including key ministers such as chancellor Rishi Sunak. The rebellion came after Johnson covered up knowledge of a minister's sexual misconduct and in the wake of scandals involving illegal parties during Covid lockdowns. Johnson also sacked Michael Gove, the 'levelling-up' minister, after Gove had advised him to quit in a face-to-face meeting.

Eurozone rules on maximum national debt levels — the stability and growth pact — are no longer relevant in an era of pandemic, war, and gross inflation, French finance minister Bruno Le Maire told the FT in an interview. "The debt rule is obsolete, simply because you have a gap of more than a hundred percentage points between one country and another in the same monetary union," he said.

Russian Security Council chairman and ex-president Dmitry Medvedev has again threatened nuclear armageddon over the West's reaction to the Ukraine invasion. "The idea of punishing a country that has one of the largest nuclear potentials is absurd. And potentially poses a threat to the existence of humanity," Medvedev said. Ukraine was investigating more than 21,000 alleged Russian war crimes already, its prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova told the BBC.

It is Tibor Navracsics, an ex-EU commissioner and minister without portfolio in Orban's new government, who was reportedly picked to work on closer relations between Fidesz and the European People's Party.

A cross-party group of MEPs presented a legal study suggesting the European Commission freeze all EU funds to Hungary, due to ongoing rule-of-law issues.

The General Court of the European Union ruled against Catalan MEPs Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín in their case against the European Parliament. It links back to 2019 when the then president of the parliament refused to recognised them as MEPs, given their names were not listed as elected MEPs by Madrid. The court said it was Spanish law, not the parliament, which had obstructed the two MEPs.

The EU's border police Europol said 39 arrests have been made in a migrant-smuggling network. "This criminal group is suspected of smuggling Middle-Eastern and East African irregular migrants from France to the UK with the use of small boats," said Europol, in a statement. The network was taken down by police from Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands and the United Kingdom in an operation coordinated by Europol and Eurojust.