European Union

Investors and small businesses are not, in fact, as keen on tracking-based online adverts as Big Tech's lobbying efforts have claimed, new research revealed on Monday, ahead of this week's plenary vote on stricter rules for online platforms.

Simply opening the Taiwanese Representative Office in Lithuania's capital, Vilnius, sparked a large-scale expansion of China's economic warfare against democracies. China's actions amount to a fundamental attack on the DNA of the European Union: the internal market.

Length of video : 82'

Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2022 - EP

Length of video : 83'

Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2022 - EP

Media are invited to follow the ceremony, which takes place at the start of Monday’s plenary session at 18.00 in Strasbourg.

Source : © European Union, 2022 - EP

The European Parliament’s spokesperson will hold a last-minute briefing on the 17-20 January plenary session today at 16.30.

Source : © European Union, 2022 - EP

Monday, 17 January

Source : © European Union, 2022 - EP

Media are invited to follow the ceremony, which takes place at the start of Monday’s plenary session at 18.00 in Strasbourg.

Source : © European Union, 2022 - EP

MEPs will honour Parliament President David Sassoli, who passed away on 11 January, elect a new president and discuss the French EU presidency’s plans during the first plenary of 2022.

Source : © European Union, 2022 - EP

James Kanter becomes new editor-in-chief of EUobserver - Shada Islam will be editor of the EUobserver magazine.

There are also numerous loopholes in the deal which will enable corporations to keep portions of their profits outside of the scope of the tax, so paying even less than 15 percent.

The French parliament, on Sunday, gave the final approval to a stricter 'vaccine pass' system, after president Emmanuel Macron said that his strategy was to "piss off" the unvaccinated. Under the new system, a negative Covid-19 test will no longer allow people to access public venues, such as restaurants. Protesters demonstrated in Paris and other cities against the new rules. Some 78 percent of the French population is fully vaccinated,

The US State Department has held talks with energy firms to supply more power in the event of Russian gas-cut offs to Europe accompanying a new invasion of Ukraine, Reuters reports. "We've discussed a range of contingencies," a US source said. The talks come amid sky-high gas prices in EU markets and Russian refusals to increase supplies, in what Russia's deputy prime minister Alexander Novak blamed on poor European planning.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Amsterdam on Sunday to protest against Covid-19 related measures and vaccination campaigns as new daily infections hit a record in the country, Reuters reported. Regular protesters were joined by farmers who parked their tractors across the city centre. The Netherlands reported a record high of 36,000 new infections on Sunday. Over the weekend, anti-vaccine protesters also took the streets in Hungary and Austria.

Rainer Wieland, a German centre-right MEP, has defended spending €690,000 on office renovations on the 15th floor of the EU Parliament in Brussels, including €25,000 doors and €25,000 light fittings. He called it an "ideas lab" that can be used by other MEPs, including for filming, The Guardian reports. "I find it very difficult to justify that kind of expense to the EU taxpayer," German Green MEP Daniel Freund said.

Microsoft said in a blog post on Saturday that it had identified destructive malware in systems from agencies and organisations linked to the Ukrainian government, Reuters reported. Affected agencies include organisations that provided emergency response functions and a technology firm that manages websites for public and private actors. Ukraine suspects a hacker group linked to Belarus intelligence carried out an important cyber-attack that hit government websites last week.

Denmark's former defence minister, Claus Hjort Frederiksen, has been charged with treason and could face 12 years in prison, he said Friday. "I am charged under section 109 of the Penal Code for having violated the limits of my freedom of expression," he said. He previously revealed Denmark and the US stole information from undersea cables. Denmark's military-intelligence chief was recently jailed for six years for leaking secrets to media.

Unknown hackers stole and published 1.8m data-points of sensitive information about the Polish military's arms, ammunition, machine parts, and software, including from US, German, and Israeli-bought weapons systems, according to Polish news agency Onet.pl. The leak occurred on 9 January and information was downloaded by Chinese and Russian internet users, it said. "This is strategic data, which Russian intelligence wanted," Piotr Pytel, the former head of Poland's military counterintelligence, said.

Sweden is bringing home 150 special-forces soldiers from Europe's 'Takuba' counterterrorism mission in Mali, in line with previous plans, but might also pull 250 from a UN mission, called Minusma, in the region due to the arrival of Russian mercenaries in Mali, Swedish foreign minister Anna Lind said Friday. "We now know [there] is the [Russian] Wagner group ... the question is what do we do with Minusma," she said.

Plenary Session

Source : © European Union, 2022 - EP