Category: Europe
-
World Patient Safety Day this year focuses on people living with long-term conditions. The reason is structural: chronic illness means more medicines, more clinicians and more handovers, and most safety systems were built around short acute episodes instead.
-
The head of the Serbian Orthodox Church led the funeral service for a man convicted of genocide. Most Christian traditions hold that funeral rites are prayers, not verdicts. But nothing in that theology required an honour guard, a patriarch and thousands in the street.
-
Europe started enforcing its AI law on 2 August. Today is the closing date for expressions of interest in forty new posts at the office that has to do the enforcing — a week before the first systemic risk evaluations from frontier developers are due.
-
Britain is preparing measures on Israeli settlements, centred on the E1 corridor east of Jerusalem. Israel’s foreign minister has warned of unspecified retaliation. What is likely to be in the package, what precedent suggests will be left out, and how to read a vague threat.
-
Serbia buried Ratko Mladić with military honours and a state send-off. Bosnia has recalled embassy staff and suspended bilateral meetings — but cannot sever relations, because the decision rests with a presidency whose Serb member attended the funeral.
-
Two people were killed and at least ten injured in overnight drone and missile strikes on Kyiv, with damage recorded at sixteen locations across five districts. The attack ended a weekend pause that had coincided with the first official visit by US envoys Witkoff and Kushner.
-
A campaign group, not a public authority, is prosecuting alleged animal welfare offences at a Lincolnshire pig farm. A court deadline falls this week. Nobody has been found guilty of anything, and the case is as much a test of who enforces animal welfare law in England as of what happened on one farm.
-
Pope Leo XIV has devoted his September prayer intention to the care of water, opening the five-week Season of Creation with a Mass at Castel Gandolfo. Behind the appeal sits a figure the Vatican cited directly: a quarter of the world’s population without safe drinking water.
-
France recorded 53 days of heatwave conditions this summer, a figure Météo-France calls unprecedented, and its hottest June-to-August period since measurements began in 1900. The environment minister has promised adaptation measures and a five-year funding plan by the end of September.
-
At the G20 innovation ministerial in North Carolina, the world’s largest economies unanimously adopted US-proposed guidelines favouring lighter-touch AI governance. Four weeks earlier, the European Commission had begun enforcing the AI Act. Both things are now true at once, which is the actual state of global AI regulation.