Two Italian Eurofighters scrambled from Šiauliai in Lithuania and shot down a drone that had entered Latvian airspace, and two Turkish F-16s from Ämari in Estonia went up at the same time. All the aircraft were under NATO command and an investigation is running. Latvia's defence ministry wrote that the vehicle had entered the country as a result of Russian electromagnetic warfare, and this is the second such shootdown over Latvia after the first in June.
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RTÉ · Friday, 14 August 2026
Montenegro and Albania are nearing membership, Ukraine and Moldova are taking their first definitive steps out of Moscow's orbit, and EU officials say more negotiating chapters have closed in the last six months than in the whole of the preceding decade. Iceland is meanwhile holding a referendum, with voting open until 29 August, on resuming its accession talks. The question now forcing itself on Brussels is geographical balance: Serbia's bid divides member states, and calls to keep the balance could tie Ukraine's progress to Belgrade's.
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Euronews · Thursday, 13 August 2026
A monitoring plane run by SOS Méditerranée and the Humanitarian Pilots Initiative sighted eleven bodies in an advanced state of decomposition on Friday, around 57 nautical miles or 105 kilometres from the Libyan coastal city of Zuwarah. The Italian coast guard says it notified Libyan authorities because the bodies lay in Libya's search and rescue zone. The IOM said this week that 821 people died or went missing in the central Mediterranean in the first four months of the year, a rise of 111 percent on 2025, while arrivals on the same route fell 46 percent to 8,577.
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Euronews · Friday, 14 August 2026
