Opponents say proposal to end sick notes issued over phone would fill up doctors’ waiting rooms unnecessarily

A German proposal to end the right to get short-term sick leave from a doctor over the telephone as a means of cracking down on skiving has met with outcry from labour groups and the medical profession.

Germans enjoy some of the most generous employee illness policies in Europe, a fact the conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, says is undermining efforts to kickstart the EU’s biggest economy, whose growth has largely stalled since 2022.

Appeasing Trump has only emboldened him. But European leaders are not as helpless as the US president believes

• Georg Riekeles is the associate director of the European Policy Centre

EU leaders’ tough rebukes to Donald Trump in Davos must be followed by concrete action when they convene in Brussels on Thursday night. The US president’s attempt to strong-arm Greenland and Denmark, backed by explicit tariff threats against those who refuse to comply, is not bluster or improvisation. It is economic coercion, openly deployed to force political submission and territorial concessions. The danger lies in the demand itself, but also in how Europe responds.

The EU has reached a moment of truth. If it cannot defend one of its member states whose most basic interests are under direct threat, then the EU is weakened as a geopolitical actor and emptied of purpose.

Georg Riekeles is the associate director of the European Policy Centre

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

As Mark Carney, Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen decide ‘to live in truth’, what will it take for Starmer to call out Trump?

Donald Trump has told the Davos economic forum “without us, most countries would not even work”, but for the first time in decades, many western leaders have come to the opposite conclusion: they will function better without the US.

Individually and collectively, they have decided “to live in truth” – the phrase used by the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel and referenced by the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, in his widely praised speech at Davos on Tuesday. They will no longer pretend the US is a reliable ally, or even that the old western alliance exists.

Trump has backed away from using force against Greenland but that doesn’t leave Europe any safer, writes world affairs editor Sam Kiley

The membership fee to join the Board of Peace reportedly costs $1 billion

Magali Lafourcade says the two envoys were convinced the far-right leader’s corruption trial had been political

A French magistrate has said two Trump administration emissaries approached her seeking to lobby against an election ban on the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

Magali Lafourcade, the secretary general of France’s human rights commission (CNCDH), an independent body that advises the government, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) she had reported the content of the meeting to the French foreign ministry immediately, fearing a potential “manipulation of the public debate in France”.

Director of Wien Museum says ‘we all have to economise’ as city temporarily reduces access to cultural sites

It prides itself on its reputation as the world’s home of classical music. But Vienna will temporarily close several museums dedicated to famous composers this year as the Austrian capital cuts its culture budget to meet public spending targets.

The apartment where the Austrian composer Franz Schubert died, the residence of “Blue Danube” writer Johann Strauss, as well as the house where Joseph Haydn lived are to be closed temporarily as cost-saving measures, the director of Vienna’s museums announced on Wednesday.

He lit up Europe with bands ranging from Peachfuzz to Kings of Convenience. But it was the Whitest Boy Alive that sent Erlend Øye stratospheric. As they return, the soft-singing, country-hopping sensation looks back

If you were to imagine the recent evolution of music in Europe as a series of scenes from a Where’s Wally?-style puzzle book, one bespectacled, lanky figure would pop up on almost every page. There he is in mid-90s London, handing out flyers for his first band Peachfuzz. Here he is in NME at the dawn of the new millennium, fronting folk duo Kings of Convenience and spearheading the new acoustic movement. There he is strumming his guitar in the vanguard of Norway’s “Bergen wave”. Then he’s off spinning records in Berlin nightclubs during the city’s “poor but sexy” post-millennial years. By the 2010s, he’s driving a renaissance of Italian chamber pop as part of La Comitiva, his bandmates hailing from the southern tip of Sicily.

It’s hard to think of a figure more musically cosmopolitan than Erlend Otre Øye, connecting the dots across a continent where national scenes rarely overlap – and making magic happen. No wonder his debut solo album, with 10 tracks recorded in 10 different cities, was called Unrest. Of all his reincarnations, though, the one that has best endured (if you go by Spotify) is his four-piece, The Whitest Boy Alive. And this spring and summer, they’re reuniting for a tour of Mexico and Europe to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Dreams, their debut album.

From the ‘big bazooka’ to a world cup boycott, Europe has powerful weapons beyond ‘dialogue. An emergency EU summit could be a turning point

• Don’t get This Is Europe delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

“I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland,” wrote Emmanuel Macron in a private message to Donald Trump this week. Trump posted the text on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday, seemingly to humiliate the French president. But Macron might have been speaking for millions of bewildered European citizens.

As Russia’s war physically tears into Ukraine, Trump’s phoney war on Europe over Greenland risks breaking apart the western defence alliance Nato.

US president tells business and political leaders in Davos his country needs ownership to defend ‘unsecured island’

• Business live – latest updates

Donald Trump has stepped up his demand to annex Greenland in an extraordinary speech in Davos, but said the US would not use force to seize what he called the “big, beautiful piece of ice”.

Addressing thousands of business and political leaders at the World Economic Form in the Swiss ski resort, the US president said he was “seeking immediate negotiations to once again discuss the acquisition of Greenland by the United States”.

Watch live as Donald Trump delivers a major speech at Davos in his latest attack on Washington’s allies in Europe amid his continued threats over Greenland.

At least 42 people have been killed in one of Europe’s deadliest crashes