Elderly residents in Ida-Viru County have lost the right to free bus travel after a pilot project's budget ran out in under two months due to uptake being underestimated.

An outage affecting services provided by Microsoft disrupted operations at numerous Estonian institutions and businesses on Friday, including government agencies, many of which use the company's office software.

The government must decide what level of readiness Estonia will achieve and by when, and then secure the funding and personnel needed to reach that goal. If readiness targets are lowered, that should be stated clearly. Otherwise, a misleading impression may emerge about the state's actual level of preparedness, Auditor General Janar Holm said in his annual address to the Riigikogu.

Political scientist Tõnis Leht said that the emergence of Social Democratic Party prime ministerial candidate Jonatan Vseviov has altered the dynamics among the parties' candidates for prime minister and pushed Isamaa leader Urmas Reinsalu into the background.

Elderly residents in Ida-Viru County have lost the right to free bus travel after a pilot project's budget ran out in under two months due to uptake being underestimated.

An outage affecting services provided by Microsoft disrupted operations at numerous Estonian institutions and businesses on Friday, including government agencies, many of which use the company's office software.

Tallinna munitsipaalpolitsei ja Coop Harju viivad koos läbi pilootprojekti «Varu targalt», mille raames avati kriisivarude riiul Kristiine Coop Peremarketis.

«Ise alles 15, aga juba selline võrgutaja! Mis ta ema selle peale ütleb?» Oleks tegu teismelisega, oleks äsja nähtud paljastused ja erutavad mängud tõesti liig. Aga et tegu on äsja 15 saanud vallatu erootikabutiigiga Ulakas Kaunitar, teeb ta täpselt seda, mida tegema peabki. Paku endale veidi silmalõbu ning vaata tõeliselt ulakat galeriid! Sõna saavad ka kolm seksikat diivat.

A former adviser to Ukraine's pro-Putin ex-prime minister Mykola Azarov was seriously hurt, Russia says.

The Ukrainian president says it makes sense for European leaders to be involved as Ukraine hopes to eventually join the EU.

Microsoft has said the outage was not caused by a cyber-security incident, but efforts to fix the issues have so far been largely unsuccessful.

Jensen Huang's personal life may have triggered the crisis, but the questions now reach into the White House itself.

LONDON — The U.K. civil service plans to hold more in-person job interviews and diminish the role of written candidate statements in an attempt to combat a surge in applications created by AI. Recruiting managers have seen a sharp rise in the number of applications for each role without any change to the overall number of viable candidates across the system, said a U.K. government official with knowledge of the conversations not authorized to speak publicly. Cabinet Secretary Antonia Romeo believes some applicants are using AI to generate bland personal statements, meaning they can apply for more roles but fail to show their personal skills.  In the most extreme cases, entire applications — even virtual interviews — appeared to have been generated by bots and not human beings, the official added. There is at least one case in which civil servants became so suspicious during a virtual video call that the candidate was not a real person that they terminated the interview early. The official said the civil service plans to move away from personal statements — and for flagship recruitment schemes, leaders are looking at reintroducing compulsory face-to-face interviews. Fewer personal statements The changes are likely to form part of a wider review of Whitehall which Romeo is due to deliver to Prime Minister Andy Burnham by summer 2027. Romeo said in her annual lecture on Tuesday that she planned to “strip back and simplify” Whitehall recruitment to attract the most talented people from all backgrounds, adding she wanted to end “formulaic job ads, generic interviews and slow processes.” This includes scrapping “success profiles,” a core feature of the civil service’s bureaucratic recruitment process. A new selection framework is due to be launched from April 2027. However, a rise in face-to-face interviews will also mean some recruitment takes longer — just as civil service budgets are under intense pressure. It is also an example of the challenge facing ministers and officials who plan to embed more AI into the civil service itself.  Romeo said on Tuesday that AI would “radically rewrite” the way Whitehall works, including with “frontier teams” in departments with looser recruitment rules and a more AI-focused “Fast Stream” program for university graduates. Dave Penman, general secretary of the First Division Association union for senior civil servants, said he had also seen an uptick in suspected AI-generated applications to the union. “These legitimate concerns don’t mean that the whole system is broken and everyone applying for jobs is faking it. I suspect what the civil service is facing is similar to many other areas of recruitment.”

BRUSSELS — The European Union institutions kept calm and carried on regulating on Friday, as many other parts of the world muttered at their computers over a massive digital outage at U.S. tech leader Microsoft. The European Commission, Council of the EU and European Parliament were able to carry on business as usual, with systems remaining largely unaffected. Microsoft’s global outage, which disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot started on Thursday, with internet traffic monitoring site Downdetector reporting issues in at least 74 countries. The tracker logged nearly 140,000 reports of Outlook problems at its peak. Microsoft on Friday morning said recovery was still uneven. “At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation,” it said. At the European Commission “the impact … is very limited and does not affect our operations,” spokesperson Thomas Regnier told POLITICO. He said the outage had a “minor impact on a limited number of applications, such as the slowness of SharePoint.” Outlook and Teams were “fully operational,” Regnier said. The Council of the EU, which gathers representatives of national governments, also carried on work: Outlook and Teams were “working on our side,” a Council official told POLITICO, declining to give more details on the institution’s IT setup. The Parliament’s press service said in a statement to POLITICO that it was unaffected and was monitoring the situation as a precaution. The outage is exposing the reliance of companies and governments on Microsoft services — an issue that has also been a longstanding concern in Europe among proponents of keeping more control over IT and digital infrastructure. In October last year, a similar outage of Amazon Web Services servers prompted immediate calls for Europe to boost its tech sovereignty. Efforts to move away from American tech providers got a boost in the past two years due to concerns that the U.S. administration of Donald Trump could disrupt digital services in Europe for political gain. Governments across Europe have launched a wide range of initiatives to boost local competitors to U.S. Big Tech and build public services on homegrown platforms. One example is the government of Germany’s northernmost state of Schleswig-Holstein, which in 2025 moved about 40,000 mailboxes from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to open-source alternatives to reduce their reliance on U.S. tech. The state’s digitalization minister, Dirk Schrödter, said in a comment to POLITICO on Friday that disruptions like the Microsoft outage “must be taken very seriously,” whether the state uses open-source software or products from individual providers. “We must be able to intervene ourselves at any time if problems arise,” he said. Francesca Micheletti contributed to this report.

As Spain faces a deepening housing crisis, a Barcelona-based cooperative offers an alternative to renting and buying. Its non-profit, right-to-use model provides affordable, long-term homes. Could it help tackle Europe's housing crisis?

As talks to end Russia’s war in Ukraine make little progress, Moscow is pushing for a wider deal on Europe’s security, raising fears that the Kremlin is seeking to reshape the continent’s future on its own terms.

Midterm gains give party room to overhaul NDAA funding, including provision to integrate US-Israeli military industries.

Playing their first game since Cristiano Ronaldo's retirement, two-time champions Portugal face Denmark at home.

Kaja Kallas warns against agreeing to Russia’s proposed sequence of events on talks on UkraineHungary’s Péter Magyar is also here, looking very elegant as always…… but it looks like he took a slight detour on the way back to hotel last night to try and pour a perfect pint of Guinness. Continue reading...

Censored books spanning 1926-96 contained themes ‘likely to corrupt or deprave’, or references to contraception or violenceFor almost a century, an Irish government building in the heart of Dublin has hosted a secret sanctum: the banned books room.The department of justice, on St Stephen’s Green, did not grant public access, because the shelves contained 12,000 books deemed indecent or obscene. Continue reading...

German government says it ‘anticipates a very big impact’ on economy

A match made in denim, fashion on film, atmospheric Christmas shopping and more