Euobserver.com

The British government announced on Wednesday an extra £2.1bn [€2.3bn] in preparations for a no-deal Brexit on 31 October, including stockpiling medicines, extra border officials and a public awareness campaign. Sajid Javid, the finance minister, announced an immediate £1.1bn, with a further £1bn available. The opposition Labour party called it an "appalling waste of tax-payers' cash, all for the sake of Boris Johnson's drive towards a totally avoidable no-deal".

Some 7.5 percent of people of working age were unemployed in June in the 19 EU countries in the eurozone, Eurostat reported Wednesday. This was the lowest unemployment rate since June 2008. For the whole EU (28 countries), the unemployment rate was even lower at 6.2 percent, the lowest since monthly reports started in 2000. People under 25 still face more difficulty, with EU youth unemployment at 14.1 percent.

EU citizens filed applications to see documents 6,912 times last year. The commission called this "a striking increase" compared to 2017 - and subtly hints at needing more staff.

The fragmented new Europen Parliament does not necessarily foretell paralysis in future EU work on migration and asylum. It is however likely that any new initiatives to be tabled over the next five years might require increasingly-longer gestation cycles.

One-in-five cars equipped with Audi's emissions cheating technology is still on the road, mostly in eastern Europe.

Boris Johnson held his first meeting in Belfast on Wednesday, with Sinn Fein immediately telling him they could not trust him to be impartial, since his parliamentary majority for any Brexit deal relies on the support of the protestant Democratic Unionist Party in Westminster. Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald told reporters: "He tells us that he will act with absolute impartiality. We've told him that nobody believes that."

The UK's new Brexit negotiator, David Frost, is coming to Brussels for meetings with officials from the European Commission "over the next days", a commission spokeswoman confirmed on Wednesday. Frost, who is also new prime minister Boris Johnson's Europe adviser, will be meeting with Clara Martinez Alberola, head of president Jean-Claude Juncker's cabinet, the commission's interim secretary-general Ilze Juhansone, and Article 50 Task force strategy director Stephanie Riso.

The German EU Commission president-elect hopes to bridge divisions within the EU, as she meets with EU leaders setting up her team of commissioners.

Romanian interior minister Nicolae Moga on Tuesday resigned, after massive public outrage over the police's handling the suspected kidnapping, rape, and murder of a teenage girl. The move comes after thousands protested in Bucharest at the police's slow response to the disappearance of a 15-year-old girl, who had called the emergency dispatcher three times before being murdered. The national police chief had been sacked last week.

The French agriculture minister has called US president Donald Trump's threat to tax French wine "completely moronic". Trump threatened last week to retaliate after French plans to tax US firms such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, boasting on Twitter that American wine is better. "It's absurd, in terms of having a political and economic debate," Didier Guillaume said Tuesday. "American wine is not better than French wine," he added.

German prosecutors have opened a murder investigation into an Eritrean man, suspected of pushing a mother and child onto the tracks at Frankfurt's train station, killing the eight-year-old son. The motives of the 40-year-old, who is married with three children, and had been living in Switzerland since 2006 where he was granted asylum in 2008, remain unclear, according to police. Prosecutors were planning a psychiatric test for the suspect.

Wildfires have burned in some 3.2m hectares of Russia's Siberia region, roughly the size of Belgium, while the country's third-largest city, Novosibirsk has been engulfed in smoke. A state of emergency had been declared in southern Siberia where 25 people have been killed. Greenpeace said the fires have "become an environmental disaster throughout the country."

Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar and British prime minister Boris Johnson have held their first conversation since Johnson took power last week. In a phone call between Dublin and London, Varadkar told Johnson that the EU was "united" that the withdrawal agreement could not be reopened, and that there were "no satisfactory options" for a technological fix for the Irish border, which will become a new UK/EU border on 31 October.

Pan-European strategy "encouraged" member states to publish national artificial intelligence strategies by mid-2019. Germany, France and the UK have already done so - others are lagging behind.

If the commission is to protect the rule of law in the EU, it has to confront the situation realistically and honestly – including how to deal with states who aren't willing to play by the rules.

Germany's top court will issue a ruling on Tuesday on the European Central Bank's (ECB) role as a supervisor, and if it acted within its mandate when it started buying bonds, DPA reported. A German plaintiff argued that the country is assuming liability-risks through the ECB programs that are beyond its control. The ECB bank regulators currently oversee 114 institutions, which hold 82 percent of banking assets in the eurozone.

Czech prime minister Andrej Babis will nominate Vera Jourova for a second term in the EU Commission, he told reporters on Monday after meeting with commission president-elect Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels. Jourova has served since 2014 as justice, consumer and gender-equality commissioner. She hails for Babis's liberal ANO party. She is the eighth women to be nominated for the new commission.

Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon said Monday she believed UK prime minister Boris Johnson was pursuing a no-deal Brexit, as there was no clarity on any plan to reach a new divorce deal. "I think that is extremely dangerous for Scotland, indeed for the whole of the UK," Sturgeon said after meeting Johnson in Edinburgh, where he was booed. Sturgeon said she would continue preparations for a second independence referendum.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson will sit down for Brexit talks if EU leaders indicate they are ready to shift position on the Irish backstop in the divorce deal, his spokesperson said Monday. "The prime minister would be happy to sit down when that position changes," she said, adding that parliament had previously rejected the deal. The backstop is intended to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.

Companies that embed Facebook's "Like" button on their websites, allowing users' personal data to be transferred to the US social network firm, can be held liable for collecting the data, Europe's top court said Monday. Following a German case, judges at the European Court of Justice said websites and Facebook share joint responsibility for breaching personal data protection rules, according to Reuters.