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It will be the first time that the European Union directly funds the making of items, such as artillery.

The European Parliament on Thursday backed the use of as much as 500 million from the EU budgetto finance the bloc's industrial production capacities for ammunition, such as ground-to-ground missiles and artillery.

The regulation, known as the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP), was proposed by the European Commission in May, but was fast-tracked through the EU legislative process, with almost all the political groups voting in favour of it.

"We should not refrain from defensive capabilities support like the one that we are giving with this regulation, to ensure that Ukraine would not run out of the ammunition they need to defend from the aggression,"Brando Benifei, an Italian socialist MEP told Euronews.

Ville Niinist, a European lawmaker from Finland said in an interview that there is a specifically inserted paragraph "making sure that these extra resources with the increases of ammunition production are meant for Ukraine".

"And then secondly, to then also supply our own storages that have been depleted by supporting Ukraine," he added.

It is the first time that the EU directly finances weapons production.But not every MEP is happy about it, particularly on the Left.

"This means that we now have a situation in which the European Union funds not just research and development for arms, but not just by arms, but is also going to fund directly the production of weapons from companies that are making excessive profits already," Marc Botenga MEP told Euronews.

"The war in Ukraine for weapons companies has been a blessing, you know, so they're making excess profits and we're going to basically subsidise their production. It's a big mistake."

The money for the European military industry will come from two EU defence funds, but national governments can also top this up by amending their pandemic Recovery and Resilience Plans.

The bill's final adoption by member states will likely happen before the summer break.

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European Parliament backs EU funds for weapon & ammunition ... - Euronews

We are living through an information revolution. The traditional gatekeepers of knowledge librarians, journalists and government officials have largely been replaced by technological gatekeepers search engines, artificial intelligence chatbots and social media feeds.

Whatever their flaws, the old gatekeepers were, at least on paper, beholden to the public. The new gatekeepers are fundamentally beholden only to profit and to their shareholders.

That is about to change, thanks to a bold experiment by the European Union.

With key provisions going into effect on Aug. 25, an ambitious package of E.U. rules, the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, is the most extensive effort toward checking the power of Big Tech (beyond the outright bans in places like China and India). For the first time, tech platforms will have to be responsive to the public in myriad ways, including giving users the right to appeal when their content is removed, providing a choice of algorithms and banning the microtargeting of children and of adults based upon sensitive data such as religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The reforms also require large tech platforms to audit their algorithms to determine how they affect democracy, human rights and the physical and mental health of minors and other users.

This will be the first time that companies will be required to identify and address the harms that their platforms enable. To hold them accountable, the law also requires large tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter to provide researchers with access to real-time data from their platforms. But there is a crucial element that has yet to be decided by the European Union: whether journalists will get access to any of that data.

Journalists have traditionally been at the front lines of enforcement, pointing out harms that researchers can expand on and regulators can act upon. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which we learned how consultants for Donald Trumps presidential campaign exploited the Facebook data of millions of users without their permission, was revealed by The New York Times and The Observer of London. BuzzFeed News reported on the offensive posts that detailed Facebooks role in enabling the massacre of Rohingyas. My team when I worked at ProPublica uncovered how Facebook allows advertisers to discriminate in employment and housing ads.

But getting data from platforms is becoming harder and harder. Facebook has been particularly aggressive, shutting down the accounts of researchers at New York University in 2021 for unauthorized means of accessing Facebook ads. That year, it also legally threatened a European research group, AlgorithmWatch, forcing it to shut down its Instagram monitoring project. And earlier this month, Twitter began limiting all its users ability to view tweets in what the company described as an attempt to block automated collection of information from Twitters website by A.I. chatbots as well as bots, spammers and other bad actors.

Meanwhile, the tech companies have also been shutting down authorized access to their platforms. In 2021, Facebook disbanded the team that oversaw the analytics tool CrowdTangle, which many researchers used to analyze trends. This year, Twitter replaced its free researcher tools with a paid version that is prohibitively expensive and unreliable. As a result, the public has less visibility than ever into how our global information gatekeepers are behaving.

Last month, the U.S. senator Chris Coons introduced the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, legislation that would require social media companies to share more data with researchers and provide immunity to journalists collecting data in the public interest with reasonable privacy protections.

But as it stands, the European Unions transparency efforts rest on European academics who will apply to a regulatory body for access to data from the platforms and then, hopefully, issue research reports.

That is not enough. To truly hold the platforms accountable, we must support the journalists who are on the front lines of chronicling how despots, trolls, spies, marketers and hate mobs are weaponizing tech platforms or being enabled by them.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa runs Rappler, a news outlet in the Philippines that has been at the forefront of analyzing how Filipino leaders have used social media to spread disinformation, hijack social media hashtags, manipulate public opinion and attack independent journalism.

Last year, for instance, Rappler revealed that the majority of Twitter accounts using certain hashtags in support of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who was then a presidential candidate, had been created in a one-month period, making it likely that many of them were fake accounts. With the Twitter research feed that Rappler used now shuttered, and the platforms cracking down on data access, its not clear how Ms. Ressa and her colleagues can keep doing this type of important accountability journalism.

Ms. Ressa asked the European Commission, in public comments filed in May, to provide journalists with access to real-time data so they can provide a macro view of patterns and trends that these technology companies create and the real-world harms they enable. (I also filed comments to the European Commission, along with more than a dozen journalists, asking the commission to support access to platform data for journalists.)

As Daphne Keller, the director of the program on platform regulation at Stanfords Cyber Policy Center, argues in her comments to the European Union, allowing journalists and researchers to use automated tools to collect publicly available data from platforms is one of the best ways to ensure transparency because it is a rare form of transparency that does not depend on the very platforms who are being studied to generate information or act as gatekeepers.

Of course, the tech platforms often push back against transparency requests by claiming that they must protect the privacy of their users. Which is hilarious, given that their business models are based on mining and monetizing their users personal data. But putting that aside, the privacy interests of users are not being implicated here: The data that journalists need is already public for anyone who has an account on these services.

What journalists lack is access to large quantities of public data from tech platforms in order to understand whether an event is an anomaly or representative of a larger trend. Without that access, we will continue to have what we have now: a lot of anecdotes about this piece of content or that user being banned, but no real sense of whether these stories are statistically significant.

Journalists write the first draft of history. If we cant see what is happening on the biggest speech platforms in the globe, that history will be written for the benefit of platforms not the public.

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Opinion | Give Journalists What They Need To Hold Big Tech ... - The New York Times

WHO/Europe and the European Commission have joined forces to support countries in the European Union working to improve long-term care. The new partnership, which will inform WHO/Europes work in the European Region, will focus on improving access and quality of long-term care services while providing important support to informal caregivers, who often play a crucial role in care provision.

Within the European Region, 135 million people are living with disabilities, and nearly 1 in 3 older people cannot meet their basic needs independently. Access to good-quality, integrated, long-term care is essential for these people to maintain their functional ability, enjoy basic human rights and live with dignity.

Integrated delivery of care happens when people can access the care they need in a timely and comprehensive way, with services ranging from prevention, treatment, long-term care to rehabilitative or palliative care. These can be provided in health and long-term care facilities, in their homes or in the community.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of care systems, including inadequate long-term care services and poor integration with health-care delivery. In the European Union alone, the initial waves of the pandemic resulted in approximately 200000 deaths among residents of long-term care facilities.

The lessons of the pandemic are clear. But are we better prepared now to face a challenge of this scale? What we know is that we need to invest more in our health systems, including in the way we deliver long-term care to those who need it, said Dr Natasha Azzopardi-Muscat, WHO/Europes Director of Country Health Policies and Systems.

Improving access and quality of care across our communities will be key, in addition to supporting caregivers, irrespective of whether they are family members, volunteers or part of the workforce. We are proud of this new partnership with the European Union in this important area of work, and we look forward to leveraging all the tools we have at our disposal to protect peoples health, regardless of where they live, Dr Azzopardi-Muscat added.

"Many long-term care challenges are not just national or European, but global. We are therefore happy to join forces with WHO, building also on their extensive expertise in supporting reforms towards integrated care and adapting health systems to the needs of an ageing population. The strategic partnership with WHO is a step forward towards ensuring access to high-quality affordable long-term care for all, said Ms Katarina Ivankovi Kneevi, Director for Social Rights and Inclusion at the Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion of the European Commission.

While access to long-term care services varies across countries within the Region, available data from European Union countries indicate that only 1 in 3 older people with care needs can access care in the community.

As the population ages, the demand for long-term care is expected to rise. By 2024, the WHO European Region will have more older adults (65+ years) than children and adolescents, with an estimated 2 out of every 3 older people requiring care and support at some point in their lives.

The new partnership will develop tools to support countries long-term care reform efforts and help to monitor progress towards improved service coverage, more affordable care and better coordination of health and long-term care services across peoples life-course.

The partnerships activities will align with WHO/Europes upcoming work to support the development of integrated care for healthy ageing, including a regional framework for action on integrated health and care systems to aid coordination, collaboration, joint learning, innovation and monitoring of integrated care delivery and age-friendly communities.

The majority of care in the European Region is provided informally by families and local communities. Through their efforts, informal caregivers help to bridge gaps in service coverage and ensure care for those unable to access or afford formal care services.

The partnership will also support these informal caregivers by developing a set of open-access tools that can help them as they care for others.

The COVID-19 pandemic put enormous pressure on health and care workers and informal caregivers alike. Two out of 3 caregivers in the European Union reported deteriorating mental and physical health due to intensified caregiving responsibilities during the pandemic.

Workforce shortages, as highlighted in WHO/Europes regional report Health and care workforce in Europe: time to act, are also affecting the quality and quantity of long-term care across the Region. Urgent investments are required to address these shortages, focusing on training, recruitment, retention, and protection of the long-term care workforce.

Additionally, around 3 out of 4 informal caregivers are women, and it is estimated that women make up 80% of the formal care workforce. Despite their immense contributions to society, these caregivers often face insufficient recognition, challenging working conditions, excessive care burden, and chronic stress.

"Millions of women providing care for family members today sacrifice work opportunities, leisure time and, far too often, their health, Dr Azzopardi-Muscat explained. That is why investing in fairer care systems is so crucial to promoting gender equality. It is also the smart investment, especially if we are to create well-being economies that put peoples quality of life at the heart of economic recovery.

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WHO/Europe and European Commission establish new partnership ... - World Health Organization

Since day one of the invasion, the European Union and its G7 partners have stood shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine.

We have provided the brave Ukrainian people humanitarian support, substantial financial assistance as well as weapons and training.

Today, we are committing to Ukraine's long-term security and economic prosperity within the Euro-Atlantic community.

The G7 will issue today a declaration to this effect.

The EU will be a key partner in this endeavour.

We will continue to support Ukraine's economic endurance so it can stand up to Russia's aggression

We will continue to impose costs on Russia through sanctions.

We will continue to hold Russia accountable for its war crimes.

And we will continue, through Ukraine's accession path, to support its admirable reform efforts.

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Statement by the President of the European Commission on the G7 ... - Language selection

The European Commission has given the State two months to act on what it said was a failure to transpose EU consumer rights protections and disability access rules into national law or face being taken to the European Court of Justice.

In a statement, the EU executive said it had decided to continue two infringement procedures against Ireland and several other member states for failing to comply with their obligations under EU law in the field of consumer protection.

The Government said after the statement was issued however that it had already transposed the consumer rights directive in question and had informally told the commission about this.

Ireland and the other EU states now have two months to address the shortcomings identified by the Commission. In the absence of a satisfactory response, the Commission may decide to refer them to the Court of Justice of the European Union, the commission had said.

The commission sent a formal letter on the matter to Ireland, as well as Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Luxembourg and Poland.

The 2020 directive concerned requires EU countries to allow designated consumer organisations and public bodies to bring traders to court on behalf of consumers if they use illegal practices.

If consumers have been harmed by an illegal commercial practice, they can seek compensation, replacement, or repair.

A spokesman for the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment said on Friday that the Bill transposing the rules had been signed into law by President Higgins on July 11th.

As such, Ireland has met its obligations and transposed the directive. The European Commission was notified of this development, informally, on Wednesday, 12th July, he said. The department will formally notify the commission in the coming days and expects that the infringement proceeding against Ireland will then be closed.

At issue in the second instance of infringement procedures is the European Accessibility Act of 2019, which set out that key products and services such as phones, computers, ebooks, banking services, and electronic communications must be accessible to people with disabilities.

Businesses and services must comply with a set of EU accessibility standards by 2025 under the law.

The commission said in a statement that Ireland had yet to transpose the rules into national law and that it had failed to notify the executive on how this would be done.

It sent formal letters of notice to Ireland as well as Cyprus, Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Poland over the issue, giving the countries two months to respond and take the necessary measures or else face being taken to the European Court of Justice.

A Government response on the second directive was sought.

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European Commission gives Ireland deadline to act over consumer ... - The Irish Times