Euobserver.com

Matteo Salvini promises to send record numbers of migrants packing. However, that quickly comes up against the cost, logistics, and diplomacy, of how such a threat would be carried out - and the price for the EU as a whole.

If the EU continues to over-regulate AI, its AI systems will fail to compete on a global scale and the technology's long-term future, for better or worse, will be shaped by the United States and China.

Former German and French leaders Gerhard Schroeder and Nikolas Sarkozy joined Russian president Vladimir Putin at the football World Cup opening ceremony in Moscow on Thursday, even though EU leaders and EU officials stayed away in a quiet protest against Russian aggression in Europe. Leaders of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Panama, and Saudi Arabia were also snapped enjoying Putin's hospitality.

A complete overhaul of animal products' supply chains is needed, privileging local food chains including local slaughtering which is proven to benefit the environment, the resilience of our economy, food safety and animal welfare.

German former tennis champion Boris Becker has said his diplomatic status - he is, since April, the Central African Republic's cultural attache to the EU - ought to give him immunity from creditors' claims in bankruptcy proceedings. "I'm immensely proud of my [diplomatic] appointment ... sport is incredibly important in Africa," he said. Arbuthnot Latham, a British private bank, said he failed to repay loans and wants to seize assets.

EU negotiators have reached a deal on a new renewable energy directive. 'One of the most sensitive issues during the negotiations was biofuels from food and feed crops,' said MEP Bas Eickhout.

Local authorities in Bavaria, southern Germany, could start turning back migrants on Monday in a rebellion that threatens Merkel's authority.

The European Commission has cancelled the first call for applications for funding of public wifi hotspots, after the EU portal where municipalities had to apply experienced "a technical issue", the commission said on Thursday. "During the investigation, the commission identified a flaw in the software supplied by contractors," it said. Municipalities can apply again in autumn, and the commission said there will be no "significant delay to the programme."

This is a real moment of truth for Europe's centre-right and its adherence to EU's values of democratic pluralism and the rule of law.

The new regional government is to reopen its representations aboard. In Brussels, its new foreign minister Ernest Maragall insisted that it wanted to show "responsibility".

Italy's new agriculture minister Gian Marco Centinaio threatened on Thursday to not ratify the European free trade deal with Canada (CETA) - the EU's first major free trade deal since 2011. Speaking to La Stampa, the far-right League minister said the trade deal did not ensure sufficient protection of Italy's special foods. All 28 EU member states must approve the agreement for it to take full effect.

EU parliament and council negotiators reached Thursday a provisional deal on new EU-wide rules granting asylum-seekers the right to work six months after registration of their application, instead of currently nine months. Access to language courses should be given from day one and access to health care secured. Children should enter school no later than two months after arrival. The deal forms part of a new European asylum system.

Certain antibiotics will be set aside for the treatment of infections in humans in order to preserve their effectiveness, according to new EU regulations to stop the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) "through imports of products of animal origin". The proposal was approved by EU ambassadors on Wednesday and will now be passed to the European Parliament for a vote.

The standoff over the rescue boat, which is now heading to Spain, is part of a wider politically toxic narrative against refugees and migrants and a symptom of EU failures to reform asylum laws.

Unless the world economy undergoes "rapid and far-reaching" transition, the average global temperature increase will reach 1.5°C by 2040, according to a leaked draft version of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change quoted by Reuters on Thursday. The EU and most of the world's countries agreed in 2015 in Paris to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C. The draft said national pledges made in Paris were not enough.

Both the examples of Greece and Italy test the limits of a system with inherent weaknesses that feeds internal gaps, strengthens deficits and debts in the European South, and surpluses in the European North respectively.

The Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment says that levels of carbon monoxide can be twenty times as high when using a different measurement system.

Greek prime minister will face on Saturday a motion of no-confidence tabled by opposition leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Mitsotakis said that the agreement reached by Tsipras this week with Macedonian prime minister Zoran Zaev, over the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia's name and its claims over northern Greece, was "a bad agreement with an unacceptable national concession: for the first time, Greece recognises a Macedonian ethnicity and language."

A court in Hungary on Thursday sentenced four human traffickers (one Afghan, three Bulgarians) to 25 years in prison for their roles in the 2015 case in which 71 migrants suffocated to death in a truck found on a motorway in Austria. They were found guilty of being part of a criminal organisation, human smuggling, and murder. Ten other defendants also received prison terms. The verdicts can be appealed.

At a meeting next week, eurozone finance ministers and the IMF are expected to agree on new cash, debt relief measures, and a monitoring mechanism to ensure that Greece can live without international aid for the first time since 2010.