Russia is once again threatening NATO with nuclear weapons. The Kremlin has sent a letter to the Atlantic Alliance in which it warns that it is prepared to resort to atomic weaponry if the defense organization attempts to block the Kaliningrad region, a Russian enclave located between Poland and Lithuania, with access to the Baltic Sea.

The fires this summer have left a lesson for the continent: climate emergencies are a new reality that we must live with. Just in July, simultaneous fires in France and Spain burned nearly 100,000 hectares and the brutality of the fire put emergency services against the ropes, to the point that they had to ask for help from other European Union states.

NATO is prepared to respond to Russia's hybrid attacks. This was defended by the organization's secretary general, Mark Rutte, who clarified that these "response options" will not always be "public" nor will they be "symmetrical or proportional". "It will not always be 'an eye for an eye', but we have the response options we need", asserted the leader of the military alliance in a press conference after meeting with the Prime Minister of Lithuania, Mindaugas Sinkevicius, in Brussels.

Negotiations have begun to define what the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union should look like, a vital policy for the agricultural and livestock sector in the country. The Agriculture ministers of the Twenty-seven debated this Monday the first lines of work outlined by the European Commission for the new CAP. The reform, however, proposes fewer resources and more leeway for states to decide how to distribute them. In Catalonia, the sector views the proposal with concern because it fears that this flexibility will end up cutting aid and creating inequalities between territories.

Russia's latest hybrid attacks have made it clear that Europe lacks a clear collective response to threats that do not reach the threshold of armed aggression. Faced with requests from various European capitals to take action (and announcements of some national plans to protect against Moscow's attacks), Brussels is looking for mechanisms to provide a joint response to these types of episodes.

The deepest transatlantic crisis in recent times closed at the latest UN summit in New York. The handshake between United States President Donald Trump, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, and Greenland's Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen, has sealed—at least apparently—the diplomatic fire ignited in January, when Washington launched a campaign of pressure and threats against the Arctic island. "In the Kingdom of Denmark, the United States has a friend and an ally it can always rely on," the Danish leader stated.

"If I had anything to announce, you would be the first to know after my grandchildren," asserted the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, when a Bloomberg journalist asked her if she would leave the institution to go to the World Economic Forum. The rumor about a possible early departure of Lagarde has been circulating for months in the economic press. In February, the Financial Times reported that she was considering stepping down before her term ended in October 2027, to allow Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz to influence the choice of her successor before the 2027 French presidential elections.

The European Union is making a major commitment to strategic autonomy in the face of the growing threat that China poses to the competitiveness of the community bloc. Brussels' latest legislative proposals to boost industry include a criterion to prioritize European products over those manufactured outside community borders in public tenders in strategic sectors such as automotive, steel, clean technologies, semiconductors, and electric vehicles. It is the requirement known as made in EU (made in the European Union, in English).

The European automotive sector is in a difficult moment. Electrification, Chinese competition, and stagnant consumer demand have pushed the European Union to take measures to protect the sector. But they are leading the industry down the "wrong" path. Brussels is trying to protect the European industry from foreign competition instead of making it more competitive. This is the conclusion of a report by the prestigious think tank Bruegel, on European policies, published this week, in which it warns that the continent's prosperity "is at stake".

After a tough negotiation, representatives of the European Union member states managed to approve new sanctions against Russia this Tuesday evening. The agreement, which until now was renewed every six months, includes sanctions against 3,000 Russian citizens and will be extended for the next three years. However, it leaves off the list two Russian billionaires close to the Kremlin, Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman.

Spain has returned to bring this Tuesday the official status of Catalan to the European Union. As the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, had already announced, the Spanish executive has explained to the EU General Affairs Council that it links the recognition of Basque, Galician, and Catalan to the accession of new states to the community club. It considers it "unthinkable" that another language be added to the official regime of the EU (such as Montenegrin or Albanian) if the official status of the co-official languages of the Spanish state has not been accepted beforehand.

Brussels is once again rapping Spain's knuckles over fiscal matters. The European Fiscal Board, the body that oversees the sustainability of public finances, reproaches the Spanish executive for requesting to activate the exemption clause from fiscal rules to spend more on defense, while this item only increased by 0.1% of the gross domestic product (GDP, the indicator that measures the size of an economy). Instead, Spain deviated by 0.4% of GDP from the recommended net expenditure trajectory.

The Spanish Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, has a clear answer. One of the "greatest obstacles" to making Catalan, Basque, and Galician official in the European Union is his Italian counterpart, Antonio Tajani. Or, put another way, the pressure that the Spanish PP exerts on its partners. This is what he stated in a speech this Wednesday at the plenary session of Congress, in which he accused Alberto Núñez Feijóo's party of influencing the European People's Party to "halt" this initiative. "The gentleman from Italy whom you invite to your congresses and whom Feijóo is always hugging is one of the biggest obstacles to these languages not yet being official –he asserted–. Have you reproached him for doing this? I have".

The concatenation of sabotage, cyberattacks and drone incursions attributed to Russia is exposing the seams of the European security architecture. Faced with an intensification of these episodes, the continent's governments have begun to consider how to respond without waiting for Moscow to cross any red line.

The Spanish government wants to tax the profits of oil and gas companies in the European Union. It considers that in the midst of an energy crisis, where prices have soared, these companies are obtaining extraordinary profits derived from the context. For this reason, together with four other countries, they brought their offensive to impose a levy on them to the Ecofin meeting this Friday. This tax was discussed at the informal meeting of Finance ministers, which took place in Dublin, according to sources from the Spanish government.

The European Parliament has approved this Thursday a resolution that qualifies the arrival of 80,000 migrants in Ceuta as an "invasion". The text, promoted by the European People's Party, went ahead with 339 votes in favor, 225 against, and 16 abstentions, thanks to the support of far-right groups in the European Chamber, in one more sign that Brussels' rhetoric on immigration is hardening at a forced pace.

The last time the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, delivered a speech before a major international forum, his message sounded like a wake-up call to the offices of European capitals. In the midst of escalating tensions with Donald Trump and a transformation of the international order, Carney proposed that middle powers join forces to gain room for maneuver against the great powers. "When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemonic power, we negotiate from a position of weakness. (...) This is not sovereignty. It is representing sovereignty while accepting subordination," he asserted in January in Davos.

Platforms like Instagram, Tiktok or Facebook will from now on have to guarantee that they are safe if they want to operate in the European Union. The European Commission presented this Thursday the European law for the protection of children on the internet, which bans access to social networks for those under 13 years of age and limits their use for minors, in order to protect them from the associated risks. To achieve this, it has announced that it will force companies to present "compliance plans" before the rule comes into force, if they do not want to be left out of the community market.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times". Echoing the words of Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities –in reference to Europe just before the outbreak of the French Revolution–, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has portrayed the moment the continent is living through today. "The state of our Union is stronger than ever. The state of our Union can also seem more precarious than ever", the German leader began in the speech on the state of the Union, with which the European political year is inaugurated every year.

The Moroccan embassy to the European Union sent a letter this Tuesday to several MEPs in which it denies having anything to do with the mass entry of migrants into Ceuta at the end of July. The missive came to light when PNB MEP Oihane Agirregoitia mentioned it during the debate on the crisis in the Spanish enclave at the European Parliament. "I want to echo this email that all of us MEPs received yesterday from the embassy of the Kingdom of Morocco," said the Basque leader, before reading a fragment of it: "Morocco is committed to readmitting all affected persons, including Moroccan citizens, unaccompanied minors, and nationals of third countries."