One person was killed in a traffic accident in Valga County on Wednesday.

Currently, disposable e‑cigarettes collected in Estonia are gathered and sent abroad to a processing partner, but waste handlers argue it would be more sensible to incinerate them instead. The Ministry of Climate does not support that approach.

President Alar Karis said in his Victory Day parade on Tuesday that he will not stand as a candidate at this autumn's election, putting an end to months of speculation.

Estonia plans to become the first country in the world to introduce digital identities for AI agents to better regulate the industry, Prime Minister Kristen Michal (Reform) has said.

Currently, disposable e‑cigarettes collected in Estonia are gathered and sent abroad to a processing partner, but waste handlers argue it would be more sensible to incinerate them instead. The Ministry of Climate does not support that approach.

The extended holiday period brought a high volume of calls for police, with domestic violence and alcohol‑related incidents dominating. Rescue crews were repeatedly dispatched to extinguish oversized, unattended, or dangerously placed bonfires.

Itaalia kunagise peaministri Silvio Berlusconi pärijad otsustasid müüa poliitikule kuulunud ja seal peetud metsikute pidudega kurikuulsaks saanud häärberi Sardiinia saarel ettevõttele, mis on seotud Katarit valitseva perekonnaga.

Euroopa Komisjonis energiaülemineku eest vastutava asepresidendi Teresa Ribera sõnul ei jäta Iraani sõja tõttu järsu hüppe teinud kütusehinnad kahtlust, et Euroopa peab viima lõpule energiatarbimise elektrifitseerimise.

France has recorded it hottest day since records began in 1947, its national weather agency says, breaking a record set on Tuesday.

The French doctor had been working in DR Congo, where more than 260 people are known to have died.

Though the person in charge of the country will change, the fiscal issues remain the same.

The prime minister's resignation has fired the starting gun on the race to be in charge of the UK's finances.

BRUSSELS — The European Union wants to make Europol the central nervous system for police to trade data and use cutting-edge technologies, as part of plans to beef up the bloc’s internal security. The European Commission unveiled plans on Wednesday to strengthen the way its law enforcement agency based in The Hague fights crime, as the bloc seeks to formulate a tougher response to threats ranging from cyberattacks to hybrid aggression previously linked to Russia-backed actors. “We are proposing to strengthen Europol’s mandate by enhancing information exchange and we are embedding cutting-edge technology at the heart of its operations,” said Commission Executive Vice President for tech and security Henna Virkkunen. The plans for a new Europol mandate include doubling its budget to €3 billion, increasing staff numbers twofold and “develop[ing] advanced technological capabilities,” the EU executive said. Some of the agency’s new toys would include a cloud infrastructure to share data in real time for crime-fighting operations, as well as technology and innovation hubs to deploy new tools such as AI. Europol currently supports cross-border investigations between national police in EU countries — often by facilitating data sharing and helping to analyze that data. The new mandate proposed on Wednesday needs to be signed off on by EU member countries in the Council and lawmakers in the European Parliament. The EU executive suggested a “fundamental shift” in how Europol sifts through the data it collects, relaxing current rules that require data to be sorted into different categories before determining if Europol can legally use it. That’s been a “key operational bottleneck,” the Commission said in the text, since Europol deals with high volumes of unstructured data. The police agency has been asking for more leeway in how it deploys everything from artificial intelligence to decryption technology, which it says is critical to fighting modern-day crime effectively. But Wednesday’s proposal also set Europol up for another epic fight with privacy authorities and watchdogs, which have clashed with the agency over issues such as retaining data about people without links to criminal activity or data it received from the EU border agency, Frontex. Civil society coalition Protect Not Surveil warned on Wednesday that the Europol reforms “dangerously erode privacy, automate surveillance, and sideline oversight.” Romain Lanneau, a legal researcher with the surveillance watchdog Statewatch, said the proposals to exchange data automatically are “thwarting the rule of law in the EU” because they go against EU rules stating that Europol can only support national police in tackling specific serious crimes. Belgian European Parliament lawmaker Saskia Bricmont said her Greens group “strongly supports” justice cooperation in Europe, but that the “far-reaching reform” to Europol “must not lead to mass surveillance or allow unlimited access to personal data.” The EU police agency has repeatedly come under fire from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), the privacy regulator that oversees Europol, for overstepping in its data collection and processing. The EDPS has also pushed back against previous proposals to expand Europol’s remit. Wojciech Wiewiórowski, who currently serves as the acting head of the EDPS, said in a statement ahead of Wednesday’s proposal that his authority will prepare an opinion on the proposal and assess whether it raises any privacy concerns.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission won’t stand in the way of the $111 billion marriage of Hollywood majors Paramount and Warner Bros. despite the concerns of European cinemas and civil society that the deal could hurt movie production and media diversity. At a closed-door meeting with competition officials in Brussels on Tuesday, the companies were told they should be able to gain clearance for the deal if they cut ties with rival Universal Pictures for movie distribution in several EU countries, two people familiar with the matter told POLITICO. The remedy would concern the United International Pictures joint venture, said one of the people, who were granted anonymity to speak because the talks are private. The remedy offer, which needs to be formalized by June 30, would stave off an in-depth probe by the Commission’s competition department, clearing one of the biggest remaining regulatory obstacles to the deal after its rapid clearance by the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this month. The approval of the DoJ’s antitrust division sparked controversy over whether its assessment was driven by politics. DoJ investigators were blindsided by the decision to clear the deal, which ran counter to their intention to recommend a challenge, the Wall Street Journal has reported.  Paramount CEO David Ellison’s father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, is a longtime ally of President Donald Trump.  European review The Brussels competition authority kicked off its own antitrust review of the deal between the two movie majors earlier this month. The original deadline for the so-called Phase One investigation was July 7, but any consideration of remedies would add about two weeks to that, pushing the timeline to July 22. In Europe, sensitivity on the deal has been high due to the continent’s filmmaking tradition — which has France at its heart. The Union of International Cinemas (UNIC) said shortly after the deal was announced that it could bring “significant downside for European cinema.” Paramount CEO Ellison flew to Paris to meet President Emmanuel Macron earlier this year to pitch the deal and address the French cinema industry’s concerns. A key worry that UNIC has shared with EU competition officials is that Paramount will slash Warner Bros. original content — such as locally produced biopics — to focus on less risky and more profitable franchises such as Mission: Impossible. Civil society groups also challenged the deal in a letter, saying it would give a U.S. owner too much control over European TV channels. “That the deal now appears likely to win conditional Phase I approval is very disappointing,” Mark Dempsey, of media freedom advocacy group Article 19, one of the letter’s signatories, told POLITICO on Wednesday. Dempsey described the proposed remedy as “insufficient” and criticized the lack of an assessment of media plurality by the European Board of Media Services, a newly created body tasked with monitoring media concentration across the bloc. A spokesperson for the Media Board told POLITICO it was still assessing whether to draft an opinion on the deal. Media freedom Dempsey said the lack of scrutiny “undermines the European Media Freedom Act, which was enacted amongst other things to act as a bulwark against media concentration and its impact on media pluralism, a fundamental component of a well-functioning democracy.” The Commission only gives marginal consideration to media pluralism and cultural diversity under its merger control remit, which focuses on whether any deal would limit consumer choice or push up prices. On the latter, the deal did not raise any further issues with the Commission, said the people. An earlier concern regarding the companies’ overlapping offer in children’s channels was dismissed by EU officials, they added. Paramount and Warner Bros. own Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, respectively. Paramount has argued there will still be adequate competition in movie production once it swallows up Warner Bros. — coming from Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Studios, Sony Pictures and Amazon MGM Studios. Several regulatory processes are still open before Paramount can seal the deal. Brussels is also looking into whether the deal received unfair foreign funding from its Gulf investors under the EU’s Foreign Subsidies Regulation, while the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority is carrying out a merger control investigation with an August decision deadline. But what’s still keeping Paramount awake at night is a threat by California Attorney General Rob Bonta to challenge the deal — which would freeze the tie-up and could trigger a wave of similar challenges in Democrat-led states.

Donald Trump has intensified criticism of ABC, alleging bias and threatening lawsuits over network's recent coverage.

Ships are moving again through the Strait of Hormuz, with oil prices falling. But relief for consumers may take longer.

West Sussex reports temperature of 35.8C, beating previous record from 1976; red weather alert extended to 72 of France’s 96 mainland departmentsTell us: how is the heatwave in the UK and across Europe affecting you?Grahame Madge, a Met Office spokesperson, said the agency is forecasting 39C as a headline maximum temperature on Thursday in the UK, most likely for somewhere in London or the south-east.“It is possible we could see temperatures higher than the 39C if the final values are at the upper end of our narrow range,” he said, according to the Press Association. Continue reading...

Previously hidden text revealed without unrolling scroll discusses stoic philosophy on ethics, art and human behaviourThe surviving part of an ancient scroll that was burnt to a crisp when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago has been virtually unwrapped and read with help from artificial intelligence.Researchers uncovered 20 columns of previously hidden text covering more than a metre of charred papyrus without physically unrolling the scroll. The work discusses stoic philosophy on ethics, art and human behaviour and dates to the second or late-third century BC. Continue reading...

‘London is cooking’, says UN secretary-general, as temperatures reach a new record for June

Brakes were applied nine seconds before the impact but it slowed only from 75mph to 49mph