The European Commission has published the names of eight Russians, including some of President Vladimir Putin's associates, and three companies which will have their assets frozen as part of sanctions against Russia's actions in eastern Ukraine.

The people on the list include Arkady Rotenberg who is Putin's long-time judo partner, and already on a US sanctions list since March.

The Kremlin’s use of disinformation has been laid bare after the shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines passenger plane on 17 July. Europeans must confront the grotesque propaganda machine on which President Putin’s authoritarian rule depends, William Horsley writes.

The European Commission has pledged an additional €2 million to tackle the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, amid fears that the virus will spread to other parts of the world.

The additional funding brings the total EU aid money disbursed to tackle the Ebola outbreak to €3.9 million.

The money will go to the UN World Health Organisation (WHO), Médecins Sans Frontières and the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent.

The Ebola outbreak is the largest of its kind ever recorded, according to the WHO.

Electric vehicle sales in Europe doubled again in 2013 for the fourth consecutive year, with more than one in every 20 new auto-buyers in the Netherlands and Norway opting for battery-powered cars, according to analysis of official data by the Transport and Environment (T&E) environmental think tank.

The paper found that 50,000 plug-in vehicles were sold across the EU in 2013 – 0.4% of all car sales – with the market set to grow to 100,000 vehicles by 2015, 500,000 by 2021 and 1 million by 2025, if the trend continues.

Germany has a moratorium on the use of fracking technology to extract unconventional fossil fuels but the method is not banned, something the country's Federal Environment Agency (UBA) hopes to change with swift regulation. EurActiv Germany reports.

Tibor Navracsics, Hungary’s minister for foreign affairs and trade, on Wednesday (30 July) confirmed he is the country’s nominee to become commissioner in the next EU executive.

Russia announced a ban on most fruit and vegetable imports from Poland on Wednesday (30 July) and said it could extend it to the entire EU, a move Warsaw called Kremlin retaliation for new Western sanctions over Ukraine imposed on Russia a day earlier.

Moscow, which buys more than €2 billion worth of EU fruit and vegetables a year making it by far the biggest export market for the produce, said the ban was for sanitary reasons and denied a link to the sanctions.

Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas has advised US whistleblower Edward Snowden to return to the United States, sparking outrage from opposition parties in the Bundestag. EurActiv Germany reports.

The European Commission has claimed the “right to be forgotten” on the internet does not supercede media freedoms, after strong criticism from the UK’s House of Lords that called for the notion to be wiped out of draft EU data privacy legislation.

Peers branded a May ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) - that has led to search engines like Google removing links to news stories from their search results - “unworkable, unreasonable and wrong in principle” in a report published today (30 May).  

The outgoing Belgian prime minister, Elio Di Rupo, has asked political parties engaged in government coalition talks to choose an EU commission nominee before Friday (1 August).

UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage has slammed David Cameron’s plans to slash the benefits of EU migrants because, to comply with European law, they must also hit UK citizens.  

Writing in the Daily Telegraph this morning (30 July), Farage said the changes to child and unemployment welfare must apply to all EU citizens, including UK nationals, or face “the fiercest opposition in the European courts”.

EXCLUSIVE / The European Commission has begun legal proceedings against Poland for amending its national laws to allow shale drills at depths of up to 5,000 metres without first having assessed the potential environmental impacts, as EU law demands.

In June, Brussels sent Poland formal notice that it was opening a case against it for infringing the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Directive, EurActiv has learned. Warsaw now has until the end of August to reply.

Twenty years after the introduction of the internal market, Europe is wealthier than ever with Germans and Danes benefiting the most from the steady increase in economic integration, according to a recent study by the Bertelsmann Foundation. EurActiv Germany reports.

EU antitrust regulators scrapped on Tuesday (29 July) a probe into the refusal by several luxury watch makers to supply spare parts to independent repairers, saying they saw only a limited possibility of finding any wrongdoing.

The three-year investigation by the European Commission was triggered by Europe's second-highest court, which in 2010 said the Commission had been wrong to reject a complaint by the European Confederation of Watch & Clock Repairers' Associations (CEAHR) against the watch makers.

The European Union's decision to impose broad sanctions against Russia was "unavoidable" after its actions in Ukraine and it is now up to Moscow to make the next move, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday (29 July).

Earlier, the EU agreed for the first time to impose broad economic sanctions against Russian oil companies, banks and defence firms, by far the strongest international action yet over Moscow's support for rebels in eastern Ukraine.

President François Hollande formally proposed his former finance minister Pierre Moscovici on Tuesday (30 July) to be France's representative in the next European Commission which takes office later this year.

In a letter to the Commission's president-elect, Jean-Claude Juncker, Hollande did not say which job he wanted Moscovici to get, but French officials have made no secret that Paris is angling for a major economic portfolio.

European Union governments Tuesday evening (29 July) agreed fresh economic sanctions targeting Russia’s oil and defence industries, state-owned banks and sensitive technologies, according to sources.

The EU had previously agreed sanctions against Russia for destabilizing Ukraine but it was spurred to further, broader action after the July 17 downing of the MH17 Malaysia Airlines flight by pro-Russian rebels.All 298 passengers, including 194 Dutch citizens, died in the tragedy, which saw relations with Moscow plummet to their worst since the Cold War.

Despite the victory of Euroscepticism in the EU elections, more Europeans believe their voice counts in the EU than ever before. EurActiv France reports.

According to a survey by the European Commission (25 July), the image of the European Union has improved.

The knock to confidence from harsher European sanctions on Russia could spoil the eurozone's budding economic recovery even if it shrugs off the fallout on trade.

Following months of hesitation, the European Union will seek on Tuesday (29 July) to seal the first broad economic sanctions on Russia - its third-biggest trading partner - following the downing of a Malaysian airliner over territory controlled by pro-Moscow rebels in eastern Ukraine.

A group of professors in Germany has filed a complaint against the EU’s new banking supervisory mechanism before the German constitutional court, claiming the European banking union has no legal basis in the EU treaties. EurActiv Germany reports.