“As expected” mumbled Commission president Juncker when an aide passed him a note saying Trump had decided to impose tariffs on European steel and aluminium. The American administration had been playing with the Europeans for nearly two months but threats of retaliation, offers of new trade deals (TTIP light), and a grand visit from the French president had done nothing to dissuade US president Donald Trump.

You are buying a house and want to know the basics. Is the roof ok; can you borrow sugar from the handsome neighbour; is this house going to end up killing you in the most insidious way? The latter isn’t information you will get from even the most honest of estate agents. But it might soon be a question you will ask, thanks to some pioneering research from an Italian T&E member that maps the spread of toxic NO2 fumes, mainly from diesel vehicles.

As delegates fly and equipment is shipped to another climate conference in Bonn, the question of who is responsible for the resulting emissions arises. The conventional wisdom is that they are covered not by the Paris agreement but by the two UN agencies which were established to regulate these sectors – the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and the International Maritime Organisation (IMO). Three years ago this may have made sense. Until the Paris agreement was finalised at the end of 2015, the major climate agreement in force was the Kyoto Protocol which tasked developed countries to work through ICAO and IMO to cut emissions.

This blogpost was first published by Borderlex

The EU should not negotiate on its multilateral investment court project until the Court of Justice of the European Union has established the compatibility of the investment court agreed in CETA, the bloc’s trade agreement with Canada, argues Kristina Wittkopp.

Countries will meet at the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law this week, in the UN’s famous New York City building, to discuss modernising the mechanism that enables foreign firms to sue governments for what they perceive as unfair policy measures that can harm future profits. This is commonly known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS. The European Commission’s proposal to reform this archaic system will form the core of the discussions.