European Union

After announcing in mid-December that he would withdraw US troops from Syria, Trump has now partially back-pedalled. The plan has met with massive opposition from his government and prompted Defense Secretary James Mattis to tender his resignation. Now Trump apparently wants to delay the withdrawal and reach an agreement with other countries. The president's zigzag course has commentators shaking their heads.

Robert Habeck, leader of The Greens in Germany, has deleted his Facebook and Twitter accounts. He explained the decision saying that Twitter made him "more aggressive, louder, more polemic and more exaggerated" than he cares to be. He also said he wanted to better protect his data, as he had also been a victim of the recent major hacker attack. Commentators discuss his move.

The Lithuanian parliament is currently debating a proposal put forward by the Radio and Television Commission aimed at banning information deemed to be damaging for the state. The way in which such content is being defined has commentators alarmed.

Luigi Di Maio, the Italian deputy prime minister and leader of the 5-Star Movement (M5S), likened the French ‘yellow vests’ to his own political movement. Moreover, he openly criticised the French government. EURACTIV France reports.

Chants of "Soubry is a Nazi" against Anna Soubry, a British pro-remain MP, outside parliament in London have prompted 55 MPs to write to British police for firmer action against "an ugly element of individuals with strong far-right and extreme-right connections" guilty of "intimidatory and potentially criminal acts" targeting politicians and others. The alarm comes after Jo Cox, a pro-remain MP, was murdered by a far-right fanatic in 2016.

Elmar Brok, the longest-serving MEP in the European Parliament, might not return after May's elections because local officials in his own party, the German centre-right CDU, failed to list him as a candidate on Monday in the region of North Rhine-Westphalia. Brok, 72, a veteran of the parliament's foreign affairs committee, told German press he could appeal the decision at a national CDU congress on 26 January.

Assets worth €870bn are being moved by financial firms from the UK into the EU in preparation for Brexit according to a report by British accountancy firm EY. Some 80 out of the 222 firms surveyed were moving or had moved personnel, and other items, to Europe, in a rising trend amid fears of a no-deal scenario. The €870bn figure is a fraction of the UK's €7 trillion financial sector

Italy's populist rulers have lent vocal and technological support to the yellow vest movement after eight weeks of riots in France.

The US has threatened to impose sanctions on Swiss engineering firm Allseas unless it pulls out of Russia's project to build a new gas pipeline to Germany called Nord Stream 2, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported on Monday, citing German government sources. Allseas, which has an operational base in the Netherlands, is meant to lay 90 percent of Nord Stream 2 on the Baltic Sea bed by 2020.

The European Commission says EU states have yet to help the 49 people stranded on the Sea-Watch and Sea Eye rescue boats - because solutions have not yet been found for the 249 people already rescued by Malta.

If misinformation in the field of migration can bring a government down, as in the recent case of Belgium following the country's adoption of the UN migration pact, then it can doubtless produce a populist majority in the European parliament.