European Union

European equities markets were in the red on Thursday as trade war fears ratcheted higher after the United States said it was looking at more than doubling threatened tariffs on a range of Chinese imports.

Facebook has deleted 32 purportedly fake pages and accounts in an attempt to prevent manipulation in the run-up to the US midterm elections. The origin of the pages remains unclear. The social network compared the process with the presumed Russian interference in the US presidential elections in 2016. Can FB get the problem under control?

The French government has lowered the speed limit on two-lane motorways from 90 to 80 km/h in a bid to reduce the number of accidents and fatalities. Austria, meanwhile, is racing in the other direction: the government in Vienna wants to raise the speed limit on motorways from 130 to 140 km/h. Commentators agree that slow is the way to go.

A Russian television crew has been killed in the Central African Republic. The three reporters had travelled to the war-ravaged country to shoot a documentary about a group of Russian mercenaries known as the Wagner group for an online news organisation owned by exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Government-critical Russian media don't believe the official statements issued on the incident.

The retirement age in the Netherlands is to be raised to 67 by 2021. Now a publication put out by the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute has sparked a debate on the subject. According to the report, people with lower qualifications should be able to retire earlier than the more highly educated. Commentators take widely differing views on the subject.

The public prosecutor's office in Estonia has launched an investigation against the Estonian branch of Danske Bank. For several weeks now the bank has faced allegations of having laundered up to nine billion dollars, most of which came from Russia. Journalists are appalled by the authorities' slowness in reacting to the affair.