Euobserver.com

Wendy Anderson, a former civil servant from the Obama administration, said a ban would not work. "The AI train has left the station. However we feel about it is actually irrelevant," she said.

Andrei Kozlov, a senior Russian Central Bank official shot dead in 2006, may have been killed in connection with what later became the Danske Bank money-laundering scandal, according to news website The Daily Beast. Kozlov had gone to Estonia three months earlier to expose illicit Russian money flowing through a Finnish bank, Sampo Bank, which was later bought by Danske Bank, The Daily Beast said, citing US diplomatic cables.

Ludmila Kozlowska, a Ukrainian activist barred by Poland from entering the EU on security grounds, is under investigation by Ukrainian security services, the SBU, for treason in a case that could lead to 15 years' prison, Ukrainian website Stopcor.org has said, citing SBU documents. Belgium, France, Germany, and the UK ignored Poland on Kozlowska, saying the Polish government had banned her because her Polish husband was a government critic.

Michel Barnier said the UK and the EU can close the withdrawal deal next week - if British prime minister Theresa May agrees to keep Northern Ireland in the customs union.

Polish president Andrzej Duda has nominated 27 new Supreme Court judges, on top of a previous 11, despite EU objections that the Polish government's judicial purge amounted to political interference. The government says former judges were opposition stooges, but their forced early retirements "ostentatiously ignore" the court's own ruling on the illegality of the move, creating lawlessness in Poland, Michal Laskowski, the Supreme Court spokesman said.

US intelligence intercepts of the emails, texts, and phone calls of Ivan Savvidis, a Greek-Russian billionaire in Greece exposed Russian plans to pay protesters and football hooligans earlier this year to stir trouble on the Macedonia name deal, the New York Times reports. Greece expelled two Russian diplomats after the US tip-off in July and complained publicly to Moscow. Russia opposes Macedonia's entry into Nato under its new name.

Just three months after Belgium finished the World Cup tournament in Russia as the world's third best team, a massive corruption scandal including hiding commissions on transfers from tax authorities has shaken Belgian football. On Wednesday clubs in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia were searched, according to the Belgian federal prosecutor's office. Operations outside Belgium were coordinated by Eurojust, the European Union's Judicial Cooperation Unit.

Greece's right-wing defence minister Panos Kammenos has proposed the United States increase bilateral security cooperation with Greece, by establishing three more permanent US bases in the country. "It is very important for Greece that the United States deploy military assets in Greece on a more permanent basis not only in Souda Bay but also in Larissa, in Volos, in Alexandroupoli," he told US defence secretary Jim Mattis in Pentagon.

German chancellor Angela Merkel's Bavarian sister party, the CSU, faces historic losses in regional elections on Sunday (14 October), with just 32.9 percent support, according to a Spiegel Online poll Thursday. The CSU won 47.7 percent at the last election in 2013. The Greens have risen to 18.5 percent. The hard-right AfD is third with 12.8 percent while 11 percent intend to vote for the social democrat SPD.

The harassment I saw of Western Sahara human rights defenders will not make it into the official report.

Finland's EU commissioner, Jyrki Katainen told EUobserver in February his cabinet members "always" takes notes when he meets lobbyists. They did not on at least seven occasions, when talking about artificial intelligence.

Malta says its 'Golden Visas' scheme attracts families that want to become "proud Maltese citizens". Meanwhile the sales to Russian nationals, and others, have generated over €700m in revenue.

In an attempt to bury a three-decade-long dispute with Greece over the country's name, Macedonia's referendum has thrown open as many issues as it sought to overcome.

German police have detained a Bulgarian national on suspicion of the weekend murder of journalist Viktoria Marinova, Bulgarian authorities said Wednesday. They have not linked Marinova's killing to her work, but Bulgarian prosecutors on Monday froze €14m held by GP Group, a construction firm suspected of defrauding EU funds, in a case prompted by Marinova's investigative reporting. Senior EU officials praised Bulgaria's "swift and intensive efforts".

U2 rockstar Bono hailed EU institutions in Brussels on Wednesday and called on artists to engage more, at a time when "people are questioning Europe". "Europe is a thought that needs to become a feeling and as an artist, I'm in the service of that," he said after meeting European Parliament president Antonio Tajani. Bono added that he will be "romancing the idea of being a European".

Members of the European Parliament's environment committee agreed on Wednesday on amendments to a new bill that would ban certain plastic items. A majority said that oxo-degradable plastics and food containers made out of polystyrene should also be banned, on top of what the European Commission proposed. The committee also agreed that makers of cigarettes and fishing gear that contain plastic should make consumers aware of their environmental effects.

Poland has added heavy coal use to the list of issues, including rule of law and migration, set to divide a new hard-right axis from the EU mainstream after next year's European Parliament elections. "The emergence of people [a hard-right grouping] who will have a different view on ... environmental protection could change EU approach to energy policy," Grzegorz Tobiszowski, Poland's deputy energy minister, told the Bloomberg news agency.

The MEP in charge of a new 'EU values' fund in the next budget wants to double the money available for protecting European values.

Companies on both sides of the English Channel could be charged more than €15bn in tariffs, and UK-EU trade reduced up to 50 percent in the long-term, a study from the IW institute in Cologne said on Tuesday. The automotive industry would be most affected with one-fifth UK tariffs paid by the German automotive industry and the British automotive industry paying one-third of EU tariffs.

"Brexit is a serious problem for Scotland. The only solution to that is to become an independent country," Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon told her Scottish National Party (SNP) conference on Tuesday. She would however wait to see details of the future relationship between the UK and the EU before presenting plans for an independent Scotland. In the Brexit referendum, 62 percent of Scots voted to remain in the EU.