Friday
27th Nov 2020
Italian multinational oil and gas company ENI has a board member advising the EU's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell. The European Commission appears to have been kept in the dark over the affair until NGOs starting asking questions.
Social policies and the relationship between the EU and India will be at the heart of the next Portuguese EU presidency agenda, according to Portugal's secretary of state for European affairs Ana Paula Zacarias.
The Brussels rumour mill has it that the EU Commission is being pressured to put forward a weaker proposal than what civil society organisations, trade unions, and the European Economic and Social Committee say is needed.
Turkey has jailed hundreds of people for life for taking part in the failed putsch in 2016, but will EU leaders care when they decide on future relations?
The joint statement by Hungary and Poland said the currently-discussed rule-of-law conditionality should be reduced in scope to "the protection of the financial interests" of the EU.
An internal power struggle has undermined the world's leading international security body since the summer. The OSCE is due to finally get new leaders in December but the unprecedented power vacuum has hit at a crunch time for hotspots worldwide.
The European Commission has urged Poland not to abandon a treaty against domestic violence, as Warsaw continues to drift further from EU norms.
Greece, Italy, Malta, and Spain want clear rules on obliging other EU states to take in migrants who land on their shores.
Poland and Hungary should ask the EU's top court to assess linking EU funds to the respect of the rule of law instead of blocking the budget and recovery package, the EU Commission chief said, most MEPs backed her up.
Brussels presented new rules on data governance, including a provision for 'data altruism', in a bid to tap the potential of mass-volume information storage - and compete with the US, China and Asia.
Some in Europe are calling for re-shoring or near-shoring supply and industrial chains of such critical sectors as medicine and pharmaceuticals, to reduce dependence on China's supply chains and market. Minister Xia Xiang sets out the opposite case.
The European Ombudsman, Emily O'Reilly, concluded the European Commission did not adequately assess potential conflict of interests when it granted a contract to the US giant BlackRock, a global investment manager, to work on environmental rules for banks.
The European Commission has unveiled guidelines and projects it says will help integrate migrants and EU nationals with migrant backgrounds.
German foreign minister Heiko Maas said the will be "able to take decisions" in the next few days on the budget and coronavirus recovery fund. Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki will travel to Budapest on Thursday.
New Israeli settlements around Jerusalem could do more harm to Middle East peace than Israel's recent deals with Arab states did good, EU foreign relations chief Josep Borrell has indicated.
The more the US comes to face economic headwinds, because of the corona pandemic, but also because of the stagnating productivity, growing external debt, and an increasingly unbalanced growth model, the more the tendency of economic nationalism will become manifest.
The parliamentary elections took place amid the Covid-19 pandemic but sparked hopes among Georgia's western allies that the electoral deal reached with the help of US and EU officials could pacify the deeply-polarised political actors. But actually the opposite happened.
Talk of a grand Turkey-Russia realignment is premature, Nato and Russia experts say - despite Putin and Erdoğan's friendly ties.
The last decade has seen air quality improvements across the continent, but many European citizens are still exposed to illegal and dangerous levels of pollution, according to a new report from the European Environment Agency.
The European Commission exchanged 24 letters with Bulgaria, Cyprus and Malta over their 'Golden Passports' schemes between October 2019 and October 2020. Malta took 67 days to respond to the commission's first letter, followed by Cyprus (42) then Bulgaria.
The Romanian study reveals that over 60 percent of parents in the countryside have not worked during the pandemic, and close to half are unable to provide adequate food, medicine, hygiene products or school supplies for their children.
The UNESCO world heritage site in Aksum, Ethiopia, other heritage sites and religious centres are now under threat. This tragedy is compounded by a terrible loss of innocent lives, sexual violence and a destabilising refugee crisis.
On Tuesday (24 November), the Körber-Stiftung in cooperation with the German Federal Foreign Office will host the 10th Berlin Foreign Policy Forum, under the overarching topic "Turning Crisis into Opportunity? Europe in a (Post-) Pandemic World Order".
A panel at the World Health Organisation said the antiviral drug remdesivir was 'ineffective' in treating Covid-19. But tens of thousands of doses have already been distributed throughout the EU and a €1bn contract signed with Gilead.
Russia is the top naval power in the Mediterranean. Turkey is a rising one, and the West's "golden days" are over, according to Italy's former military chief.
Ahead of the next European summit in mid-December, MEPs will address the EU's long-term budget and rule-of-law conditionality in another virtual plenary session. Discussions will also focus on consumer rights, pharmaceutical strategy and the pandemic.
The European Ombudsman said the climate risks from gas projects included on the EU Commission's list of priority energy projects were not properly assessed, urging the commission to address the "shortcomings" of its methodology.
The Nagorno-Karabakh war shows the West needs to rebuild relations with Turkey and put forces in Georgia to prevent still greater conflicts, the former head of US forces in Europe says.
Imposing minimum wages and interfering in collective bargaining through binding legislation, not only means breaching EU treaties - there is also a serious risk that this will undermine successful labour market models that have delivered real wage increases for decades.
Regime-linked Belarusian tycoons are to face new sanctions, while EU-Belarus relations are being cut to a minimum, according to an internal EU paper, seen by EUobserver.
German parliament president Wolfgang Schäuble outlined a vision on migration that included possibly sending people to "facilities outside Europe" while at the same time acknowledging that the EU is reliant on "dubious powers and regimes".
While online is becoming the main method for buying pets, the lack of rules on the responsibilities of platforms regarding pet advertising has severely compromised consumer protection, fair competition, and animal health and welfare.
The European Commission aims to increase the bloc's wind energy production at sea massively, reaching at least 300 GW by 2050 - a 25-fold increase from the bloc's current offshore wind capacity of 12 GW
