City Brussels Financial News

The European Union has slapped a $475 million fine on U.S. biotech giant Illumina for buying out cancer-screening company Grail without the approval of the 27-nation bloc’s antitrust watchdog

The European Union’s parliament has approved in a cliffhanger vote a major bill to protect nature and fight climate change

European Union fines biotech giant Illumina $475 million for taking over cancer-screening company Grail without approval

The European Union’s parliament has backed in a cliffhanger vote a major plan to protect nature and fight climate change

Climate change was a distant threat. Allowing countries like China or Russia into the global economy was widely seen to be beneficial for both them and their Western trading partners. As the two countries grew they would surely adopt market economics and, ultimately, democracy.

The European Union has signed off on a new agreement over the privacy of people’s personal information that gets pinged across the Atlantic, aiming to ease concerns about electronic spying by American intelligence agencies

NATO leaders are set to make a new defense spending pledge at their summit this week as support for Ukraine eats into their military budgets

The EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework has an adequate level of protection for personal data, the EU's executive commission said. That means it's comparable to the 27-nation's own stringent data protection standards, so companies can use it to move information from Europe to the United States without adding extra security.

Brussels/London | European aluminium producers are warning that a loophole in the EU’s carbon border tax will lead heavily polluting exporters such as China to circumvent the rules and flood the bloc with low cost, emissions heavy metal.

Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang's prolonged absence from public view for 12 days has raised concerns and speculation about his well-being. Qin was scheduled to meet with the European Union's top diplomat, Josep Borrell, this month, but China unexpectedly postponed the meeting without providing further information. There have been rumors in Brussels that Qin's absence might be due to health issues, but Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin stated that he had not heard about such reports during a press briefing in Beijing. The official website of the Chinese Foreign Ministry indicates that Qin's last official engagement was on June 25, where he met officials from Sri Lanka, Russia, and Vietnam. On the same day, he also participated in an event alongside Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley. Additionally, a lunch meeting between Qin and ambassadors from the European Union in late June was abruptly canceled, according to an ambassador based in Beijing who was on the invite list.

NATO was created to deter Soviet tanks and missiles in Europe. Now it is also in the business of deterring China’s global ambitions, spurring concern among some members about mission creep and accusations by Beijing of inciting confrontation.

Maritime nations have been finalizing a plan Thursday to slash emissions from the shipping industry to net zero by close to 2050 but experts warn the deal falls well short of what’s needed to prevent climate catastrophe

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The company behind the popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT says it will be forming a team to rein in and manage the risks of superintelligent AI systems. 

Wagner boss of «going off the rails» after receiving billions in public funds, as Moscow's new narrative takes shape after Wagner's brief mutiny. Last weekend the head of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, led his forces in a short-lived rebellion against Russia's top military brass, in a huge embarrassment for the Kremlin. «Prigozhin has gone off the rails because of big money,» Dmitry Kiselev, one of the main faces of the Russian propaganda machine, said on his weekly television show on Sunday.

Joe Biden has scheduled a diplomatic trip to Europe this month with stops in the United Kingdom, at the NATO summit in Lithuania and for meetings in Finland, the White House said Sunday. Biden is set to depart July 9 for «engagements» with the UK's King Charles III and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the White House said in a statement.

The violence erupted just after Macron finally saw off half a year of protests over his controversial pension reform, which dominated the domestic agenda for most of this year. But the images of shops ransacked and buses burned across the country also risk hurting Macron's international standing at a time he wants to play an instrumental role in ending the Russian invasion of Ukraine and be seen as Europe's number one powerbroker.

Renaissance artist and historian Giorgio Vasari has been returned to its owners in Tuscany more than 20 years after it was stolen, Italian police said on Thursday. The letter was dated March 18, 1566 and is believed to be worth around 20,000 euros ($21,760).

European Union leaders are set on Friday to commit to reducing the bloc's dependence on China and debate how to strike the balance between "de-risking" and engaging in areas such as climate change. «This is the million euro question,» Latvian Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins told reporters on his arrival at the two-day summit in Brussels on Thursday. «We need to de-risk and that means being able to step back to some degree because geopolitically the apparently growing relationship between China and Russia is a potential problem for all of us,» he said.

The United Kingdom on Thursday officially passed legislation to regulate cryptocurrencies and stablecoins as part of its broader financial regulatory reforms post-Brexit.

A formal agreement on how the UK's and EU's financial services authorities will work together in the future is being now signed — more than two years after it was first agreed.