Euobserver.com

EU leaders will try to agree on the 2050 emission-free target - but they will deeply disagree on EU spending over the next seven years. Meanwhile the UK will elect its new political leadership.

A new report of a Nato-accredited group concludes that social media companies like Facebook and YouTube are "the new frontier for antagonists seeking to influence elections, polarise public opinion, and side-track legitimate political discussions." These companies fail to stop fake accounts, content, likes, and followers that might influence public opinion. "The manipulation industry is growing year-by-year [and] self-regulation is not working," the report states.

Turkey condemned on Friday Greece expelling its Libyan ambassador, following a dispute over an agreement signed between Libya and Turkey on maritime boundaries in the Mediterranean. The Greek PM, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, believes that "the deal will collapse" because it has no legal merits. "Expelling an ambassador just because of the [agreement] that we signed is not a mature behaviour in diplomacy. This is outrageous," said Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.

The new incoming co-leader of the of Germany's Social Democrats (SPD), Saskia Esken, said on Friday that she was sceptical about the future of their ruling coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives, Reuters writes. "I was and I am sceptical about the future of this grand coalition. But with this resolution, we give the coalition a realistic chance of continuing - not more, not less," she told SPD delegates.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen will be in Ethiopia on Saturday in her first visit outside the EU as president of the institution. "My visit is a political statement. The African Union is a partner on which the European Union counts. Together we will continue to work on joint interests and common objectives, in the spirit of a true partnership of equals," she said in a statement.

More than 5,500 scientists and academics on Friday called on the EU Commission to enforce the European Water Framework Directive, ensuring Europe has "healthy and resilient freshwater bodies to support people and nature, today and in the future". About 60 percent of surface water in the EU is currently not in a good state. "There cannot be an effective European Green Deal without healthy water ecosystems," the statement concludes.

A trend has emerged over the past few months where desperate people are paying to get locked up in Libyan detention centres to escape the conflict and with the hope they stand a better chance of getting resettled to Europe.

Iran was "determined to resolutely continue its activities related to ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles" in violation of a UN resolution related to a 2015 nuclear non-proliferation deal, its UN envoy, Majid Takhte Ravanchi, has said in an open letter. Its foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said the EU had shown "incompetence in fulfilling [the] bare minimum" of its side of the nuclear pact after the US abandoned it.

The European Committee of the Regions has approved a resolution that supports a bigger budget for a far-reaching Green Deal. Karl-Heinz Lambertz, president of the committee, said: "The Finnish EU Presidency budget proposal is not enough to respond to the climate emergency – we need 1.3 percent of the EU-27's GNI and a clear plan on where the new funds for the Green Deal will come from."

Bosnia has finalised the three-year overhaul of a heavily-polluting power plant, the Ugljevik coal facility, which used to emit 60 times more the amount of suffer dioxide, a poisonous gas, than is normally allowed in the EU. The €80m renovation was financed by a Japanese investor and designed to meet EU demands, but a recent French veto on further enlargement has rocked confidence in Europe's commitment to the region.

EU finance ministers said on Thursday aviation could be a sector which needed to "update provisions" on taxation to fall in line with climate goals. Airlines currently pay no fuel taxes in Europe in a move which saves the industry €27bn a year, according to one NGO, and which has helped to boost cheap air travel and related emissions. Sea transport has a similar tax waiver in the EU.

Fifteen operatives from Russia's GRU military intelligence service travelled back and forth to the Haute-Savoie region in the French alps between 2014 and 2018, probably to plot attacks against targets in the EU, French daily Le Monde has said, citing a senior French intelligence source. Germany, on Wednesday, also expelled two Russian diplomats over the contract killing of a Georgian national in Germany who had been a Kremlin adversary.

According to the internationally-recognised government of Libya, around 800 mercenaries are fighting with eastern commander Khalifa Haftar to take the Libyan capital Tripoli, The Moscow Times reports. The government accuses Moscow of escalating the conflict in Libya. "We are going to visit Russia after we collect all evidence and present [it] to the authorities and see what they say," Khaled al-Meshri, the head of the government's advisory body said.

In his first interview after leaving his post as president of the European Council, Donald Tusk told The Guardian Brexit is "one of the most spectacular mistakes" in EU history, adding it was "the most painful and saddest experience" during his term in office. He was equally tough on the French veto of North Macedonia accession, calling it "strategically and politically a huge mistake."

The European Parliament's civil liberties committee offers a snapshot of the European "state of mind", says its chair Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar. Its biggest challenge will be getting member states to unblock the EU asylum package.

Few people know that the code of conduct for the European Council president is substantially weaker than the code of conduct for commissioners.

British PR firm Chelgate worked for the Maltese government on the case of murdered journalist Caruana Galizia, three well-placed sources have told EUobserver.

The EU executive responds that its public opinion survey is not a statistic, but a snapshot, after concerns were raised over the method that could result in pro-EU bias.

Last year (2018) the number of beer breweries in Europe passed 10,000, double the amount of five years ago, according to the Brewers of Europe. The increase is almost entirely due to an explosion of microbreweries, mostly in the UK and France. Despite an overall decrease in alcohol consumption, beer consumption in Europe increased, partly due to the growing popularity of non- and low-alcohol beers.

The EU council said on Thursday that "stablecoins" (a type of cryptocurrency designed to minimise the volatility of the price) "should not come into operation until all of these risks and concerns are properly addressed". The lack of adequate information about the operability and risks of stablecoins makes it difficult to reach definitive conclusions on whether and how the existing EU regulatory framework applies, the institution concluded.