Euobserver.com

Polish GDP per capita in terms of domestic purchasing power will nose ahead of Portugal's by $63 (€56) to $33,472 this year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said. The Polish economy also grew by 5.1 percent last year, compared to Portugal's 2.1 percent, as part of a wider trend in which the balance of EU poverty is tilting from the old east-west divide to a more north-south one.

Bulldozers and paramilitary police demolished a migrant camp near Gioia Tauro, in Calabria, in southern Italy, on Wednesday, putting at risk of homelessness the mostly African people who lived there and who worked on local farms for low wages, local charities warned. "As promised … we went from words to actions," Italy's far-right interior minister Matteo Salvini, who has targeted migrants in his European Parliament election campaign, commented on Twitter.

Italy is to start paying its estimated 5 million people who live below the poverty line at least €780 each a month in a "citizens' income" scheme that will cost its wobbly state budget €7.1bn in its first year. "The state is finally dealing with the invisible people, those who have been on the margins of this country and the political debate," Italian deputy prime minister Luigi di Maio said.

EU states have rejected a commission proposal to blacklist Saudi Arabia and four US territories on money laundering and terrorist financing grounds.

The EU should decide new taxes by majority instead of consensus, France has said, after four member states vetoed a levy on tech giants such as Google. "Finland, Denmark, Ireland, and Sweden shouldn't be allowed to block 23 countries from imposing a tax that they think is needed," French finance minister Bruno Le Maire said in Paris Wednesday, referring to the EU-27 after Brexit, the Bloomberg news agency reported.

The idea the EU was still facing a migration "crisis" was populist "misinformation", the European Commission said on Wednesday, while noting a fall in Mediterranean arrivals to just 116,647 people last year. "Europe is no longer experiencing the migration crisis we lived in 2015, but structural problems remain," commission deputy head Frans Timmermans said, amid far-right alarmism on migrants ahead of the European Parliament elections in May.

The Polish government has started drafting a bill to allow the 6,000 British citizens living in Poland the right to stay even in the event of a no-deal Brexit, the Associated Press news agency reports. British residents will have until the end of 2020 to apply for permits to stay on under the bill.

Belgium has proposed an EU tax on the commercial aviation industry to offset its negative impact on global warming, Belgian minister Jean-Luc Crucke said after a meeting of EU states' environment and energy ministers in Brussels on Tuesday. France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Sweden endorsed the idea, he added. It made no sense that railway transport, which was more environmentally friendly, was more highly taxed than flying, Crucke said.

EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier and his UK counterpart, Stephen Barclay, met in Brussels for a four-hour long dinner on Tuesday together with British attorney general Geoffery Cox. They made no comment afterward in an unusual step, with fewer than 30 days left to a potential no-deal Brexit. An EU official told the Reuters news agency the talks did not go well.

Italy is to sign up to China's Belt and Road Initiative in a memorandum by the end of March, the Financial Times newspaper reports, citing Michele Geraci, an Italian official as saying "it is possible that it will be concluded in time for [Chinese President Xi Jinping's] visit," to the country. The economic link-up comes amid EU and US concern on Chinese acquisitions of strategic Western firms.

EU diplomats are in talks Wednesday on whether to add the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bermuda, a British overseas territory, to a tax-haven blacklist, the Reuters news agency reports. The current list, created in 2017, contains five jurisdictions: Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago, American Samoa, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands. The new list, to be adopted on 12 March, could contain up to 15.

The European Commission has heaped opprobrium on an antisemitic carnival float in the Belgian town of Aalst, which portrayed Jews as hook-nosed money-men, last weekend, saying it was "unthinkable that these images parade in European streets 74 years after the Shoah", using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. "We stand firmly against all forms of antisemitism", a commission spokesman said.

Latvian authorities have allowed the country's suspended central bank chief, Ilmars Rimsevics, to attend Wednesday's European Central Bank's (ECB) governing board meeting in Frankfurt. Rimsevics went back to his desk last week after the EU court in Luxembourg ruled that he had been unjustly dismissed, but he still faces corruption charges at home and could end up in prison.

EU centre-right's figurehead, Manfred Weber, gave Hungary's controversial leader an ultimatum to curb anti-European behaviour or face expulsion from EPP club.

Several of Britain's elite private schools received money from shady offshore firms with ties to fraud in Russia, according to documents obtained by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a Sarajevo-based journalist club. The Charterhouse school received €350,000 from Meister Developers, a St Lucia-based firm linked to a fuel tax scam at a Moscow airport and to a money-laundering operation dubbed the "Troika Laundromat" by the OCCRP.

"There are external anti-European forces which are seeking - openly or secretly - to influence the democratic choices of the Europeans," EU Council president Donald Tusk said in Brussels on Tuesday, while meeting Armenia's prime minister. He said outside forces had interfered in the Brexit referendum in 2016 "and it may again be the case with the European Parliament election in May", amid concern on Russian election-meddling.

EU countries and the European Commission will start sharing concerns on foreign takeovers of strategic EU firms from April onward, under a new "screening mechanism" adopted by ministers in Brussels on Tuesday. The commission will also file opinions on cases that posed a cross-border threat under the new scheme, which comes amid concerns on Chinese acquisitions. "We're in a much better position to ... safeguard our interests," the commission said.

A majority of the 15 municipalities from the United Kingdom granted a €15,000 EU subsidy to set up free wireless internet voted to leave the EU.

UN environment experts on Monday presented their latest report on environmental challenges facing the planet Frontiers 2018/19, highlighting five key issues of emerging concern for the planet: gene-editing techniques; fragmentation of previously-intact landscapes around the globe; vulnerability of permafrost peatlands, widespread nitrogen pollution and maladaptation to climate change.

The EU must give Russia guarantees before it helps build a gas pipe in Bulgaria to join up to its Turk Stream 2 pipeline to Turkey, Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev told Bulgarian leader Boiko Borissov in Sofia Monday, the Reuters news agency said. Medvedev spoke after the European Commission derailed a previous Russia-Bulgaria pipeline project in 2014. He also offered money for the rebuilding of Bulgaria's Belene nuclear plant.