Wednesday
8th Jul 2020
Never a free or media-friendly country, Belarus is intensifying crackdowns on reporters in the run-up to its presidential election in August. Belsat TV journalist Dzmitry Mitskevich experienced it first-hand.
The EU would be abandoning its values if it opted for a deeper partnership with China's "dictatorship", just because it did not get along with Trump, America's ambassador to Europe has said.
Four years after the killing of an Italian activist in Cairo, Italian cities are mobilising to highlight the fate of Patrick Zaki, imprisoned since February for "inciting protest through his Facebook profile".
With the exception of South Africa and some parts of West Africa, the continent has been relatively untouched, including (quite surprisingly) highly-connected Ethiopia.
Among the casualties of coronavirus - worldwide and in the EU - is the defence sector. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has not made the world a less dangerous place and there is no alternative to having a functioning defence system.
EU commission has accused US leader of undermining multilateral cooperation, after his latest threat to permanently cut off World Health Organization funding.
It would lend credence to the idea that Washington is using the withdrawal as a threat to coerce Angela Merkel to cease ties with Russia and China, the US' main rivals.
West Bank annexation "was conceived almost entirely by men" and will crush the "dignity and rights" of Palestinian women still further, a group of 40 women leaders have said.
A new report adds weight to previous testimonies of a concerted campaign of forced sterilisation of the Uighur Muslim minority in China. Beijing denies it.
The so-called "all-Russia" vote finishing today, with more than 200 amendments to the Russian constitution, has been marked by systematic electoral fraud, mass mobilisation of the administrative resources, populistic promises or exploiting the historical memory.
"Nothing will stop" Nord Stream 2, Russia has said, after new US sanctions on a pipeline that is seeing the EU side with Moscow against its transatlantic ally.
Disappointing and frustrating: these two words describe best the way Brussels has been dealing with the conflict in Syria so far.
Regrettably, it is no longer a matter of if, but when Israel will begin to annex big parts of Palestine, including the Jordan Valley and all its 131 settlements.
In an interview with EUobserver, Chinese ambassador Cao Zhongming, talks about Hong Kong, disinformation, "unabashed bullying by the United States" on Huawei and on the role of the EU in the world.
China denies it, but Uighur exiles who fled to EU states say they are still being terrorised by threatening phone-calls, SMS-es, and other forms of "refugee-espionage".
This week, the European Union and China are holding their first joint summit since April 2019. It comes amid the pandemic, which first surfaced in China's Wuhan, protests in Hong Kong and a belligerent US president.
International burden-sharing worked in Kosovo - until the Trump administration announced White House talks with the presidents of Kosovo and Serbia on June 27, leaving the EU special envoy for the Western Balkans in the dark.
Nato is to investigate French allegations that Turkish warships targeted a French one in a confrontation over the Libya conflict, which has divided allies.
MEPs urged an end to structural racism and discrimination in Europe and the US, following the brutal killing of black American George Floyd by US police. Socialists and Green MEPs stressed the need to unblock the anti-discrimination directive.
Russia's nuclear threat to Europe is so alarming the US might deploy new weapons, but Libya has divided Western allies.
The European Union says bilateral relations are improving - because Eritrea's totalitarian dictatorship asked for €6.6m of EU money to help fight the pandemic.
Foreign ministers should tell US secretary of state on Monday that Israeli annexation means EU sanctions on Israel and a rift with the US, Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian diplomat, said.
At the height of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests last fall, for example, hashtags relating to the protests appeared abundantly on platforms like Twitter. On TikTok, however, the same hashtags yielded scant results and almost no signs of unrest.
The EU Commission Directorate General for Justice has refused to accept European Jews for a Just Peace into the Commission's Working Group on Antisemitism.
Kosovo's president and the White House are refusing to speak to the EU's new Western Balkans envoy, in what the EU sees as "lame ... misguided" tactics.
The EU has shamed Russia and China as the main perpetrators of online misinformation about Covid-19, urging social media platforms like Facebook to step up anti-fake news action.
Whether it is the West, Turkey, or Russia who think they are winning in Libya, Libyan people are the losers, according to one woman, speaking from Tripoli.
As long as European companies continue to choose the certainty of the Chinese dictatorship over the volatility of India's fragile democracy, the threat from China is not going to change soon.
China is becoming an increasing "threat" to Europe and growing closer to Russia, Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg has warned.
"You can divide a municipality, but you can't divide a mayor in two," an EU official said, in another European muddle on Israel at a critical time.
Estimates report that more than 13,000 foreign women and children are held in camps in north-west Syria. Many EU citizens who once have fled their home to join the ranks of the Islamic State are counted among the detainees.
"Thou shalt not sleep around on delegation" should be the "11th commandment" for EU diplomats, as spies still using old-fashioned 'honey-traps' in modern times.
"Let's face it: the Communist Party of China (CPC) is not our friend", writes the policy director of the European People's Party think tank, the Wilfried Martens Centre.
