The French army is to create a "red team" of sci-fi writers to imagine possible future threats. A new report by the Defence Innovation Agency (DIA) said the visionaries will "propose scenarios of disruption" that military strategists may not think of. The team's highly confidential work will be important in the fight against "malicious elements", the report states.

Police in Venice have fined two German tourists who were caught making coffee on the steps of the Rialto bridge. The backpackers, aged 32 and 35, were fined a total of €950 (£853) for preparing coffee on a travel cooker. They were also asked to leave the city. Venice has introduced a law on a series of public order offences - including picnicking at certain sites and not wearing a shirt in public spaces.

Britain’s largest supermarket chain is launching a drive to reduce food waste from bread by turning unsold baguettes and batons from its in-store bakeries into new products. Surplus bread is one of the biggest waste problems for food retailers, according to the government’s food waste adviser Wrap, particularly from freshly baked lines which have a short shelf life.

France has pushed forward with plans to tax the revenue of internet giants, while Boris Johnson indicated his support for a similar idea in Britain.

Is big tech too big? Do companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple represent monopolies that distort markets? Or are they just giving consumers what they want? In recent months, calls to “break up big tech” have been growing louder in the United States. Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, the European Union has been levying multi-billion euro fines in an effort to curb anti-competitive practices.

When protesters in reflective yellow vests took to the barricades in France, rebelling against a gas tax that would hit hardest those who could least afford it, Annalena Baerbock was watching closely from across the border. A co-leader of Germany’s Greens, Ms. Baerbock has seen her party steadily strengthen over the last year.

The first mass was held at Notre Dame since a ferocious fire destroyed the roof, spire and part of the Paris cathedral's vault — with all present wearing hard-hats, Euronews reports.

The myth that a very high level of renewables can’t be integrated into the electric grid is being demolished by the clean tech and battery storage revolution. “By 2040, renewables make up 90% of the electricity mix in Europe, with wind and solar accounting for 80%,” predict the experts at Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) in their annual energy outlook released this week.

The EU is getting serious about taxing big tech. Or maybe it’s not. In January 2019, there were reports that EU governments were going to have a new Europe-wide “tech tax” in place by the end of March. When the Ides of March approached, however, the tech tax was “dealt a final blow” as EU finance ministers failed to agree a plan.

Hot air from north Africa will push temperatures up from this weekend.

All new models of electric cars sold in the European Union must now make artificial noise under certain conditions, reports BBC News. Acoustic Vehicle Alert Systems (aka, AVAS) will need to be installed in new models of hybrid and electric cars introduced from today onward, and all existing models by July 2021. With an AVAS installed, vehicles will need to make a sound while traveling under 12 mph, or while reversing.

When she was was born - near the Irish border in County Fermanagh in 1942 - it was not unusual for families to live without electricity and running water. Margaret's neighbours only began to update their homes in the late 1940s and 1950s. But her family missed the opportunity to join the trend due to her mother's death, when Margaret was 10, and her father's ill health.

Religious leaders have reacted with outrage to a bill proposed by MPs in Iceland that would criminalise male circumcision. The bill proposes a six-year prison term for anyone found guilty of “removing sexual organs in whole or in part”. Salmann Tamimi, president of the Muslim Association of Iceland, described the proposal as an “attack on religion”.

Adidas has failed in an attempt to broaden trademark protection for its three-stripes symbol in the European Union as rivals seek to muscle into the market for striped shoes and clothing.

As people across France struggled with the pain of the devastation to Notre-Dame cathedral, more than $1-billion in donations has poured in from around the world to help rebuild the cultural landmark. French President Emmanuel Macron promised to restore the fire-damaged cathedral to its glory within five years, vowing in a televised address on Wednesday that it would be even more beautiful.

Campaigners have handed in a letter to the Minister for Agriculture, Michael Creed, calling on him to support the banning of more pesticides which harm the bee population. The European Commission has already banned three pesticides because of their impact on the declining bee population, but campaigners want the commission to go further.

Bird populations across the French countryside have fallen by a third over the last decade and a half, researchers have said. Dozens of species have seen their numbers decline, in some cases by two-thirds, the scientists said in a pair of studies – one national in scope and the other covering a large agricultural region in central France.

For more than a century, one family has helped transform the way Europe eats.

Fraudsters are every year robbing Europe’s citizens of €50 billion in tax money. A Europe-wide investigation by 63 journalists from 30 countries, coordinated by CORRECTIV.

International Life Sciences Institute used by corporate backers to counter public health policies, says study

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, and also known as home of the Large Hadron Collider, has announced plans to migrate away from Microsoft products and on to open-source solutions where possible. Why? Increases in Microsoft license fees. Microsoft recently revoked the organisations status as an academic institution, instead pricing access to its services on users. This bumps the cost of various software licenses 10x, which is just too much for CERN's budget.

Finland will go carbon neutral by 2035, under a coalition deal published on Monday, setting one of the world’s earliest timelines for reaching that mark. After more than a month of negotiations, five parties agreed on the goal championed by incoming Social Democrat prime minister Antti Rinne.

Meteorologists say temperatures could climb above 40 degrees Celsius, or more than 104 degrees Fahrenheit, across large stretches of the continent.

The EU is doing away with the twice-yearly clock changes and has given member states until April to decide if they will remain on summer or winter time. But there are fears Europe is heading for time-zone chaos.

Britain is to call for a third of the world's oceans to be protected from damaging activity by 2030. The ambitious target, announced at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, would ensure the marine environment has a "buffer" against the effects of climate change, plastic pollution and human exploitation. It's a significant victory for Sky Ocean Rescue which has campaigned for tighter marine protection.

As the EU advances the new Copyright Directive towards becoming law in its 28 member-states, it's important to realise that the EU's plan will end up censoring the Internet for everyone, not just Europeans. A quick refresher: Under Article 13 of the new Copyright Directive, anyone who operates a (sufficiently large) platform where people can post works that might be copyrighted (like text, pictures, videos, code, games, audio etc) will have to crowdsource a database of "copyrighted works" that users aren't allowed to post, and block anything that seems to match one of the database entries.

Today, Electronic Frontier Foundation sent the note below to every member of the EU bodies negotiating the final draft of the new Copyright Directive in the "trilogue" meetings. The note details our grave misgivings about the structural inadequacies and potential for abuse in the late-added and highly controversial Articles 11 and 13, which require paid licenses for links to news-sites (Article 11) and censoring public communications if they match entries in a crowdsourced database of copyrighted works.

The country has voted to remove 'blasphemy' from the Constitution. Some 951,650 people voted 'yes' in the referendum that featured alongside the Presidential Election on Friday, making up 65 per cent of the total valid votes (1,467,458). The move was welcomed by leading figures earlier in the day, after an exit poll conducted by RTÉ and Red C showed some 71.1pc of participants voted to remove the term from the Constitution.

French president makes new appeal for force in run-up to First World War Armistice centenary

Spanish police are asking for help naming a rescued puppy that they plan to train as a new member of the force. Responding to a call, the authorities in Granada found a man kicking a German shepherd on the street. After stopping the man and rushing the dog to hospital, the officers decided to adopt and recruit the puppy.

With bees on the endangered list and the terrible consequences that will come to pass if they become extinct, France has taken a drastic step in an attempt to save the population of pollinating insects. As reported by Organic Consumers, the European nation has decided to ban all five pesticides that scientists believe are responsible for killing bees.

Here they go again. The leaders of the euro zone are once more inching forward in their quest to form a fiscal union that will, they hope, shore up the common currency. At a time when Italy seems hell-bent on causing Euro Crisis 2.0, that might sound like a good idea. Upon scrutiny, however, the proposals, even if they pass, are risible. They are too timid to integrate the euro zone economically. Simultaneously, they are large enough to embolden Eurosceptics and populists.

The European Union says it wants to become the first major economy to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

For the past two weeks, a massive protest movement known as the “yellow vests” has shaken France. While the movement began as a way for low-income people to voice their anger at the government’s efforts to target car pollution with a heavy carbon tax, it has now spiraled into an ongoing, at-times violent expression of general dissatisfaction with president Emmanuel Macron, as well as France’s political system and labor laws.

The storied Knights of Malta shaped the Maltese capital of Valletta into a ‘city for gentlemen’, but how much longer can chivalry survive in the modern age?