Europe

https://archive.is/btnSE

Muslims across Europe are grappling with a “worrying surge” of racism that is being fuelled in part by “dehumanising anti-Muslim rhetoric”, the EU’s leading rights agency has said, as it published a survey in which nearly half of the Muslim respondents said they had recently experienced discrimination.

Published on Thursday by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), the survey of 9,600 Muslims across 13 member states found that racism and discrimination threads through most aspects of their lives.

People reported children being bullied in school, inequalities in accessing job opportunities and prejudice when it comes to renting or buying homes.

https://archive.is/haF5d

Northvolt has been plagued by problems from incompetent management and poor safety standards to over-reliance on Chinese machinery, according to current and former workers at the cash-strapped Swedish battery maker.

Northvolt grew so fast in terms of employees and projects that processes were chaotic and management often incompetent, most of the workers said.

Since 2021 Northvolt has been involved in 47 workplace accidents involving chemicals classified as particularly dangerous by Sweden’s work environment authority, according to public broadcaster SVT.

https://archive.ph/QBgGr

https://archive.ph/St640

As Big Tech’s market power grew, so did its political clout. Now, as the EU tries to rein in the most problematic aspects of Big Tech – from disinformation, targeted advertising to unfair competition practices – the digital giants are lobbying hard to shape new regulations.

Read the full report.

In 'The Lobby Network', Corporate Europe Observatory and Lobbycontrol offer an overview of the tech industry's EU lobbying firepower. For the first time, we map the 'universe' of actors lobbying the EU’s digital economy, from Silicon Valley giants to Shenzhen’s contenders; from firms created online to those making the infrastructure that keeps the internet running; tech giants and newcomers.

We found a wide yet deeply imbalanced ‘universe’:

• with 612 companies, groups and business associations lobbying the EU’s digital economy policies. Together, they spend over €97 million annually lobbying the EU institutions. This makes tech the biggest lobby sector in the EU by spending, ahead of pharma, fossil fuels, finance, and chemicals.
• in spite of the varied number of players, this universe is dominated by a handful of firms. Just ten companies are responsible for almost a third of the total tech lobby spend: Vodafone, Qualcomm, Intel, IBM, Amazon, Huawei, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google spend more than €32 million making their voices heard in the EU.
• out of all the companies lobbying the EU on digital policy, 20 per cent are US based, though this number is likely even higher. Less than 1 per cent have head offices in China or Hong Kong. This implies Chinese firms have so far not invested in EU lobbying quite as heavily as their US counterparts.
• digital industry companies are not just lobbying individually. They are also collectively organised into business and trade associations which are themselves important lobby actors. The business associations lobbying on behalf of Big Tech alone have a lobbying budget that far surpasses that of the bottom 75 per cent of the companies in the digital industry.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21375406

The yearly rule of law reports were launched five years ago and are presented by the commission as a key weapon in its armoury against democratic backsliding, including corruption and attacks on independent media and judiciary, across the union.

But Liberties, an EU-wide network of civil liberties organisations, pointed on Monday to several “significant deficiencies” and said “swift and decisive action” was now essential if the commission was to be able to uphold the rule of law in the bloc.

“The commission’s annual rule of law report is certainly useful for detecting violations – it’s effective as a monitoring exercise,” said Viktor Kazai, Liberties’ rule of law expert. “It has country-specific recommendations; that’s great.”

Issued in July, this year’s report – which was particularly critical of declining media freedoms in Italy – was reportedly delayed by Ursula von der Leyen as she sought support from Rome for re-election as president of the bloc’s executive.

https://archive.is/7OQh3