Former Estonian ambassador to NATO Jüri Luik says it's troubling that the U.S. has allowed Russia to make demands about Europe's security alongside Ukraine peace talks.

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.

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.

Rahvuste liiga C-tasandil seni neljas mängus kaotusi vältinud Eesti meeste jalgpallikoondis kohtub täna Luksemburgiga. Kas Sinisärgid jätkavad ilusat seeriat ka Luksemburgi vastu, selgub kell Eesti aja järgi 21.45 algavas mängus, millest teeb otseblogi Postimees.

Tartu ringkonnakohus jättis neljapäeval rahuldamata Tartu abilinnapea Priit Humala (Isamaa) kaebuse kaitsepolitsei (kapo) vastu, milles ta nõudis infot, milliseid varjatud toimingud kapo tema suhtes enne kriminaalmenetluse alustamist tegi.

The fact the question of European security now features in discussions is viewed in Moscow as a victory, BBC Russia Editor Steve Rosenberg says.

German reforms mean foreign and domestic intelligence services will have greater powers to combat espionage, terrorism and sabotage.

Microsoft says it is continuing to restore services including Outlook and Teams following a global outage.

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

DUBLIN — Friday’s widespread outage of Microsoft products has sparked a new wave of calls for Europe to control its own digital infrastructure — especially with the uncertain future of artificial intelligence at stake. “Only 20% of European digital services run on European infrastructure,” Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said in remarks Friday after he addressed EU national leaders during their first-ever meeting on artificial intelligence in Dublin. The money spent on foreign, U.S. or Chinese, technology “could be reinvested here, on infrastructure we control and [to] finance European research and development,” said the boss of Europe’s leading AI frontier lab. Mensch didn’t specifically address the Microsoft outage, which lasted nearly 24 hours and affected millions of users in 74 countries. Still, the shutdown of key tools like Outlook email and Teams messaging impacted plenty of the tech and government leaders gathered in Dublin to chart Europe’s AI future. French President Emmanuel Macron closed the day with a post on X: “Our independence cannot be outsourced. It must be built here at home, in Europe,” he wrote. “When it comes to artificial intelligence, too, Europe has everything it takes to compete. We have no time to lose.” An EU diplomat present at the leaders’ talks said that “we need to pick up speed, permitting and investment to compete on the world market, to have sovereignty.” Tech sovereignty, including control over the cloud, chips and models that power AI, has been a rallying cry of the second mandate of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and was one of the key agenda items at Friday’s gathering of the leaders of the EU’s 27 member countries. “We have outsourced too much of our digital infrastructure to actors outside the EU,” Finnish European Parliament lawmaker Aura Salla said in a press release Friday following the outage. She suggested that government contracts specifically “must support European technology.” Others zoned in on the risk created by relying on digital infrastructure controlled by a couple of large companies. The Microsoft outage is a “reminder of the systemic risk created by concentrating digital infrastructure with a few global tech giants,” said Sebastian Toffaletti, secretary general of the Digital SME Alliance, in a statement shared with POLITICO. In the U.K., the Liberal Democrat party’s tech spokesperson Victoria Collins said the outage demonstrated the need for a digital sovereign strategy, saying: “We need urgent action to stop relying on a handful of companies.” In Germany, lawmaker Johannes Schätzl from the Social Democratic Party said it raised questions about public procurement. “Digital sovereignty must be measured by whether we can remain operational even during outages like this,” he said. Joe Bambridge and Kilian Hocke contributed reporting.

LONDON — A former Labour MP who was suspended from the party following allegations of sexual harassment has joined Plaid Cymru, the ruling party in Wales.  Geraint Davies made the announcement on the news website Nation Cymru, where he claimed that he was forced out as an MP because of “local rivalries and disobeying Keir Starmer’s orders to speaking [sic] out against killings in Gaza.” He described allegations of sexual misconduct against him as “untrue anonymous hearsay in the media.” In 2023, five women alleged that Davies, a former Commons select committee chair, subjected them to unwanted sexual attention, both physical and verbal, after coming into contact with them through his work as an MP. Davies had the whip suspended as a Labour MP immediately after the allegations were made public but remained a member of the party until 2025. When the claims against Davies were first reported by POLITICO, he said he did not “recognize” them, adding: “If I have inadvertently caused offence to anyone, then I am naturally sorry.” In these instances, the women had raised concerns about his behavior informally but had not complained in writing. At least two women later filed official complaints with the Labour Party, resulting in an investigation lasting more than a year. Davies was not eligible to stand as a candidate in the 2024 election because he was suspended, and quit the party ahead of a planned hearing on his conduct in 2025. As a result, the hearing never went ahead. The former MP for Swansea West argued in the article published Thursday that the party engineered his removal as a candidate for factional reasons. “I was made to wait 23 weeks without any complaints. When complaints were made, they were ‘to support other women’ who had not made any complaints. None were reported to Parliament,” he said. Two women who previously made allegations against Davies, and were granted anonymity to protect their privacy, contacted POLITICO on Friday to object to his statement to Nation Cymru. One, a sitting Labour MP first elected in 2015, said she had entered a formal complaint with the party to raise an allegation of unwanted touching. “Having been touched by Geraint against my wishes, I can say the allegations of sexual harassment are more than hearsay. Whilst I can’t speak for other women’s experiences, I know the way he touched me left me deeply upset and unsettled and I spent most of the years we were both MPs trying to put as much physical distance between us as was possible,” she said. A second woman said: “As someone who experienced this behaviour firsthand, I know that these claims are not hearsay. Women don’t come forward because of exactly this kind of platform and response.”  A Labour Party spokesperson said: “All complaints are assessed thoroughly in line with our rules and procedures. To protect the confidentiality of the complainants, we do not provide information about specific allegations made.” They added: “It is categorically untrue to suggest that the fact Mr Davies was not re-selected as a Labour candidate was unconnected to the serious allegations made about his conduct.”   A spokesperson for Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, said: “Plaid Cymru treats all complaints of sexual harassment and abuse with the utmost seriousness. Every concern raised is taken seriously, and allegations are considered fairly and thoroughly, taking into account all available evidence. We encourage anyone who has experienced or witnessed inappropriate behaviour to come forward, so that concerns can be properly investigated and appropriate action taken.” Davies did not respond to a request for comment.  

Stelco's US owner blames Trump's tariffs for layoffs, but its support for those same tariffs has raised questions.

Moscow blames Kyiv for a series of car bombings that have targeted people linked to the war with Ukraine.

Mohammed Alfatih rearrested over alleged plot to target Israelis in Europe while detained for attack on bailiffA former Hamas bodyguard convicted of knife crime in the UK is wanted in Germany for allegedly plotting to murder Jewish people.Details of the alleged plot can now be reported after Mohammed Alfatih, also known as Mohammed Naim, was found guilty on Friday of a knife attack on a bailiff outside his home in Birmingham. Continue reading...

This blog is now closedHungary’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...

Chancellor and his finance minister have yet to agree on a candidate for one of three central bank executive board vacancies

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