European Commission not ready to approve Spain’s request for support in Ceuta

The European Commission said Thursday it is not ready to approve Spain’s request for emergency support in dealing with the Ceuta migration crisis, as further information is needed before a decision can be made.

Commission spokesman Markus Lammert said at the daily press briefing that the requests were being evaluated and that the Spanish government still needs to provide further information regarding several questions. Ceuta, which shares a land border with Morocco, is one of Spain’s two enclaves on the North African coast and forms part of the European Union’s external border.

Between late July and early August, a massive wave of undocumented migrants crossed from Morocco into Ceuta after misinformation about Spain’s migration policy spread widely, triggering one of Spain’s most severe border crises in recent years.

Around 80,000 undocumented migrants are estimated to have entered Ceuta from Morocco during the crisis, with about 5,000 still stranded in the city as of the latest reports.

The Spanish government formally requested emergency support from the European Union on August 28 to manage the situation, including staffing from Frontex and remote assistance from the European Union Agency for Asylum.

China’s trade in services maintained steady growth in the first seven months of 2026, as the export of travel and transport services drove more than half of the overall export expansion, official data showed Thursday.

The country’s service trade totaled nearly 4.45 trillion yuan (about 655.8 billion U.S. dollars) during the period, up 8.3 percent year on year, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

During the period, service exports rose 17.1 percent year on year to over 1.77 trillion yuan. Service imports exceeded 2.67 trillion yuan, up 3.2 percent from a year earlier. The country’s services trade deficit narrowed by 176.33 billion yuan year on year to 900.25 billion yuan.

A breakdown of the data showed travel and transport services emerged as the two export growth drivers. Travel service exports surged 27.7 percent, while transport service exports rose 27.1 percent. The two categories contributed 22.1 percent and 29.9 percent, respectively, to the overall growth of services exports.

Knowledge-intensive services also remained a pillar of China’s export mix. Trade in such services, which include telecommunications, information technology, finance, intellectual property and other business services, increased 6.6 percent to over 1.96 trillion yuan, accounting for 44.1 percent of the country’s total services trade.

China has intensified policy efforts to boost service sector development. The outline of the 15th Five-Year (2026-2030) Plan and this year’s Government Work Report both made specific arrangements for this sector.

In April, the State Council issued a guideline on advancing the expansion and quality upgrading of the sector. According to the guideline, China aims to make marked progress in high-quality service sector development, with the total scale of the sector exceeding 100 trillion yuan by 2030, while more competitive and influential “China services” brands will be cultivated.