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The bloc nation has been given one month to back down on judicial reforms or the European Union will take its nuclear option and ban Poland from voting on EU matters.

This power, under Article 7 of EU treaties, has never been used yet Commission President Jean Claude-Junker is growing furious at the defiance of Poland.

Speaking last week Mr Juncker said: These laws would have a very significant negative impact on the independence of the judiciary and would increase the systemic threat to the rule of law in Poland.

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Now, he has taken his angry rhetoric one step further by insisting Poland is leaving itself out of the comfort of the inner circle - along with its ally, Britain.

In an interview with Politico in Brussels, Mr Juncker said the EU is facing problems with Poland.

Mr Juncker said Poland will be more lonely after Brexit when questioned about its current refusal to fall into line with other member states.

The issue is over planned reforms of Polands judiciary system.

Prime minister Beata Szydos PiS party wants to reform the court system and give the government the power to name the chief justices of the EU member's common courts.

Parliament would choose members of the National Council of the Judiciary, which protects the independence of courts.

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European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker greets EU Commission Chief spokesperson Margaritis Schinas

The EU claims this would put judges at the mercy of politicians and runs the risk of corruption and inequality.

Former Prime Minister, Jarosaw Kaczyski, chairman of the right-wing Law and Justice party (Pis) is insisting he would not back down.

However, when it came to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbn, Juncker trod more carefully.

Strongman Mr Orban has repeatedly refused to cower to Brussels and has huge approval ratings in his homeland.

He held a referendum on the EUs rights to enforce quota systems on his country - and more than 90 per cent voted against Brussels.

The issue at the time was migrant quotas - coming directly after Hungary erected the first razor wire fence to stop illegal migrant over its land border with Serbia.

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Mr Juncker said despite all the rule breaking he is not at odds with Hungary.

He said: Well, Ive got a caring relationship with Orbn. We talk regularly, I see him regularly even if its not always made public because I think I do not want to lose Hungary.

Britains Brexit talks began last month with David Davis Mp and his team going up against Michel Barnier -chief Brexit negotiator.

Negotiations are expected to last up until the leave date in March 2019.

Read more:
'You'll be lonely after Brexit' EU's Juncker unleashes fresh threat to rebel Poland - Express.co.uk

MEPs and legal experts have claimed the veto over the territorys future after Brexit would give Spain special status among EU nation, when they should be on an equal level.

The EUs Brexit negotiating guidelines stated that the Brexit deal will not apply to Gibraltar without an agreement between the kingdom of Spain and the UK.

Experts have told the Telegraph that the veto could be illegal under EU law.

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Gibraltar has its own political system that makes many decisions within the territory but issues like defence and foreign affairs are determined by the UK Government in London

EU Law expert Professor Steve Peers from the University of Essex said: Nothing is clear about the legal issues arising from Article 50.

Usually the European Court of Justice says the EU has flexibility in international negotiations.

In 2002 Gibraltar held a referendum on its sovereignty with the majority of people wanting to remain a part of Britain.

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Gibraltars chief minister Fabian Picardo has said his country would not be excluded from talks to secure a better post-Brexit deal.

Mr Picardo has said he would not accept any compromise with Madrid on the future of the Rock.

He said: We will not accept any compromise on sovereignty, jurisdiction or control as the price for any new future trading arrangements with the United Kingdom and the European Union.

The Secretary of State David Davis has told us he would not do a deal on a future trade deal with the European Union if it excluded Gibraltar.

Spain has a long-standing territorial claim on Gibraltar, which has been held by the UK since 1713.

Madrid has made it clear that it views the UKs departure from the EU as its chance to reclaim sovereignty.

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'Nothing is clear! Spain's Brexit veto over Gibraltar could be ILLEGAL under EU's laws - Express.co.uk

Biaowiea National Park which spans 350,000 acres in Poland and Belarus is a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson/NPR hide caption

Biaowiea National Park which spans 350,000 acres in Poland and Belarus is a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The lush, green canopy that is Bialowieza Forest spans 350,000 acres between Poland and Belarus. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is home to a variety of endangered species like the European bison, which is slightly larger and leaner than its American cousin.

It also has some of the last old-growth forest in Europe, untouched by human hands, and there is a great deal of international interest in preserving the forest's delicate ecology.

Polish journalist, author and naturalist Adam Wajrak said he never tires of seeing the complex life cycle in this forest up close.

"Look at there, here, you see?" he asked me, pointing to the top of a dead spruce trunk during a recent hike. "This is the little spruce growing on the body of dead spruce, this very often happens."

He peeled back the top layer of another dead trunk.

"If you look under the bark, there's a lot of beetles, a lot of spiders everything, whatever you want, and this is how it works," he says. "This is why I compare the Bialowieza Forest to coral reef because in coral reef, a lot of life is based also on the dead corals. So this works like that."

But the Polish government insists Mother Nature has lost control of Bialowieza Forest. Poland's Minister of the Environment Jan Szyszko has repeatedly warned of a spreading bark beetle infestation targeting spruce trees in particular.

The camp outside Biaowiea National Park where environmental activists are staying as they try to stop loggers. They've hung a sheet that says: "Bialowieza, Run Forest Run" playing on the popular Tom Hanks movie "Forrest Gump." Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson/NPR hide caption

The camp outside Biaowiea National Park where environmental activists are staying as they try to stop loggers. They've hung a sheet that says: "Bialowieza, Run Forest Run" playing on the popular Tom Hanks movie "Forrest Gump."

He says the forest must not be left to its own devices and that infected trees and those around them must be cut down. Last year, he approved a plan that triples the amount of logging in parts of the forest. It sparked an international outcry.

Foresters are planting less vulnerable oak saplings to replace the trees they are logging but that hasn't appeased critics, who complain the replanted woodlands look like man-made tree farms.

The Ministry of the Environment isn't budging on its claim that only human intervention can save this forest. It defends its plan on its official website, noting in big letters at the end: "We'll see who is right."

Mariusz Agiejczyk, the deputy chief in the Hajnowka district office overseeing state forests, firmly backs the ministry's plan. The General Directorate of the State Forests, a government agency, funds its activities from the $2 billion Polish logging industry.

Agiejczyk blames the bark beetle proliferation in the Bialowieza Forest on global warming and previous reductions of logging quotas there.

"The [Polish] foresters are here since 90 almost 100 years, and look how beautiful the forest is," he says. "This kind of criticism that says we are harming it is absurd, we did not do anything wrong."

The European Union's highest court is siding for now with the Polish government's opponents, who argue the beetle infestation must be left to nature. The European Commission which is the EU's executive arm and is leading the legal action in the Court of Justice case argues the Polish logging violates the bloc's wildlife protection laws.

On July 28, the court imposed a temporary injunction against logging in Bialowieza Forest to protect the trees while the case is being decided. But Szyszko said on July 31 that Poland won't abide by it, and that logging which he referred to as "protective measures" for the forest would continue.

Should Poland lose the case before the European Court of Justice, it could face fines of more than $4.7 million, plus possible penalties of around $350,000 each day.

Meanwhile, environmental activists are not waiting for officials. They've descended on Bialowieza Forest from around Europe in recent weeks to try and block the loggers.

Joanna Bienkowska, 30, of Greenpeace, is one of the activists who recently moved into a camp near the forest with other protesters. They've hung up a sheet that says "Bialowieza: Run, Forest, Run," playing on a line from Forrest Gump.

Bienkowska said she and the other activists spend their days hiking, biking and driving around the forest with maps, binoculars and GPS devices in search of the mechanical harvesters that cut down as many as 200 trees each day.

"We don't know where are harvesters, so we are looking for them," she says. "[They] are moving so fast with guards, so sometimes we don't know where they are."

Fellow activist Marcin Skopiski, a university student in cultural and social anthropology from Warsaw, says he recently helped form a human blockade that chained itself to a forest harvester.

Deputy superintendent of the Hajnowka Forest District cuts of bark of spruce to find woodworm and woodworm larvas in Biaowiea National Park. Wojtek Radwanski/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Deputy superintendent of the Hajnowka Forest District cuts of bark of spruce to find woodworm and woodworm larvas in Biaowiea National Park.

"During patrols, I've see a lot of places where logging [is] taking place and it's a very sad thing to see," says Skopinski, 25. "Like some of the parts are looking like a storm came in or some huge destruction happened."

The activists say it's increasingly difficult to get to the harvesters because of the armed foresters, scores of whom are being sent here from around Poland to protect the logging operations.

But what they show me is the aftermath of the logging. Felled trees stripped of their bark and bearing the harvester's signature gouges are piled high along roads and trails, where trucks will haul them away.

Nearby, dozens of other trees are marked with fluorescent pink dots. They will be cut down next.

Continue reading here:
Poland Clashes With European Union Over Logging In Primeval Forest - NPR

A record number of people in EU countries now personally feel like they are citizens of the European Union, according to a long-running survey monitoring the continents views on integration.

As Britain heads towards the exit door the rest of the continent feels more positive about European identity than ever, with a solid 68 per cent of the population telling the regular Eurobarometer poll that they feel they are a citizen of the EU.

The up-tick also comes alongside a sharp increase in optimism for future of the continent-wide bloc, with a big fall in people who foresee the continents economy worsening over the next 12 months compared to last year.

56 per cent of people across the continent are optimistic about the future of the EU in general a rise in six points on the previous survey published in the autumn of last year.

21 per cent also now think the EU economy will get worse, down from 28 per cent in the last poll, while 21 think it will get better, up from 18 per cent. 45 per cent believe it will stay the same.

There were sharp rises in EU optimism in France, where new president Emmanuel Macron saw off a far-right challenger, and Portugal, whose government has ended austerity and kick-started growth with an investment programme.

When the European Commission started asking about EU citizenship identity in 2010 62 per cent of people said they felt like EU citizens.

The latest results appear to contradict the narrative spun by the Leave campaign that Brexit would cause a domino-effect of other countries wanting to leave the bloc.

The new figures also come amid a solid increase in growth across the continent and a hardening of attitudes to secession from the union as the so-far shambolic nature of Britains exit becomes clear.

In the first quarter of the yearthe UKs economy fell to the bottom of the EU growth league, with first quarter GDP figures being beaten by every other EU country. The UKs 0.2 per cent growth rate in that period was well below the Eurozones 0.6 per cent rate.

Britain also lagged behind the eurozone in the first quarter, with 0.3 per cent growth compared to 0.6 per cent.

The Eurobarometer survey is conducted by the European Commission and polls the view33,000 people across the EU.

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More Europeans than ever say they feel like citizens of the EU - The Independent

Sweeping reforms are set to take charge of European consumers online privacy and data concerns next spring, but the impact could be global and a huge win for consumer privacy advocates. The regulation applies if the companies collecting or storing data are based in the European Union or deal with data of E.U. residents, even if their headquarters are elsewhere.

Passed by the European Union in April 2016, the regulation officially known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or known as PR-speak on Twitter as #GDPRubbish is supposed to give Internet users more control over the ways that their personal information is used.

As the BBC explained, Simply put, organisations need to keep records of all personal data, be able to prove that consent was given, show where the datas going, what its being used for, and how its being protected. If companies dont comply, they could face penalties of 20 million euros or up to 4 percent of annual global turnover (whichever is greater).

The European Parliament shared this breakdown when the regulation passed:

The new rules include provisions on:

The GDPR is scheduled to take effect in May 2018. Were in the middle of the two-year transition period for companies to come into compliance, but one survey found that more than 60 percent of organizations havent even started implementing their new protocols.

As Axios Sara Fischer pointed out, That means everyone from Google to your neighbor who sells shoes on eBay could be affected. Its also not just tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook that are involved, but data-collecting businesses across all sectors including publishers.

However, the tech companies will be leading the way. Were going to see innovative things from Google and Facebook in terms of how they deal with it, David Downing, executive vice president at ASG Technologies, told Axios.

Startups and smaller companies are worried about the regulation being overly burdersome.

We hold millions of datapoints on our users and we already take protecting this very seriously. Our customers trust us with their data on the assumption that we wont leak or lose it, which we dont, Tom Davenport, the CEO of a London technology company with 10 employees, told the Sun. Its fundamentally pretty straightforward. Its frustrating therefore to now be hit with such a massive and complex piece of legislation in this area.

European Union officials say its necessary: This is the kind of price we pay for a civilized way for the flow of personal data in the world, Wojciech Wiewlorowski, assistant supervisor at the European Data Protectionin Brussels, told Axios.

The new law equals bigger fines for getting it wrong but its important to recognize the business benefits of getting data protection right, a spokesperson for the U.K.s government agency in charge of enforcing the GDPR told the BBC.

A coalition to raise awareness of the regulation just launched today in Ireland, with a newsletter highlighting the buzz around the GDPR as its official implementation deadline approaches in May.

While the regulation is grounded in the European Union (and will still apply in the United Kingdom after it exits the group), analysts say the GDPR is a big step in securing consumer data worldwide.

I am optimistic that many of the GDPRs protections will trickle down from the EU to other western nations, wrote Simon Crosby, the cofounder of an global online security company, in a Forbes post. For a large enterprise such as a bank, implementing different controls and procedures for managing privacy for each geography in which it operates is likely to be onerous.

The regulation can be a bit jargon-heavy, which led to the popularity of the #GDPRubbish hashtag. (Weve included some of the more coherent and comprehensive breakdowns as links in this piece.) People have been fact-checking different claims about GDPR on Twitter, though we cant verify that all the tweets on the hashtags are accurate.

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The European Union's new data privacy rules will make companies worldwide clean up their online security, or else - Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard