Poland and Hungary have both claimed their votes were crucial to the election of new EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, in the hope of getting benefits from the new executive. Poland's prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki told reporters on Tuesday ...

It seems almost inevitable that Ursula von der Leyen will have a tough fight with the governments of the EU member states over the gender balance of their nominations for EU commissioners. Von der Leyen, approved as the new president of the European ...

EU states ought to undergo a yearly "Rule of Law Review Cycle" to help stop countries such as Hungary, Poland, and Romania from backsliding on EU norms, the European Commission has said. The process would see EU officials take information from national ...

The European Commission is to propose annual rule-of-law checks on all EU states amid tensions with Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Its proposal, to be unveiled in Brussels on Wednesday (17 July), is to model the legal screening on the annual fiscal reviews ...

Counting the votes. That is what everybody did the entire day before the real vote started in the European Parliament on the candidacy of Ursula von der Leyen to become president of the European Commission. It was the first time in decades that the vote on ...

The recent European elections have been marked by the alarming rise of far-right; seen from the outside, one could feel more reassured for the percentages in Greece, with Golden Dawn scoring 4.87 percent, and the newly founded far-right party Greek ...

The new rotating president of the EU Council, Finland, is not planning to discuss with other member states the issue of EU member states accepting corporate sponsorships to cover part of the costs of the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU. "We do ...

On this day five years ago (17 July 2014) 298 passengers of the Malaysian flight MH17 were heading to Kuala Lumpur when suddenly a Russian BUK missile launched from the not by the Ukrainian government controlled part of Donbas hit the plane, killing ...

The European Commission's top civil servant, German lawyer Martin Selmayr, will step down following German minister Ursula von der Leyen's advent as commission president. An EU spokeswoman confirmed the news to German website dw.com after Selmayr himself ...

Monday's EU decision not to reimpose sanctions on Iran was like "the European appeasement of the 1930s" of Nazi Germany, Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu has said. "There are those in Europe who won't wake up until Iranian nuclear missiles fall on ...

EU anti-trust commissioner Margrethe Vestager is to open a probe into whether US online retailer Amazon abused information gleaned from other traders who use its website, two EU sources told the Financial Times newspaper. The move risks further annoying US ...

France has ditched its candidate Jean-Francois Bohnert to be the EU's first public prosecutor in favour of Romania's Laura Kovesi, the Financial Times newspaper reports. A French official said the move "will ... allow the rapid establishment" of the new ...

Oil and gas drilling leases granted by US president Donald Trump on 378m acres of publicly-owned land since he came to power could dump more CO2-type gasses in the air than all 28 EU countries do in a year, according to American NGO the Wilderness Society. ...

The EU's goods trade surplus with the US for the first five months of 2019 rose to €62.1bn from €55.4bn in the same period last year. The increase could stoke tensions after the US already imposed tariffs on some EU exports to get the numbers down. At the ...

Israeli plans to demolish 10 Palestinian apartment buildings on the edge of Jerusalem were part of a "policy that undermines the viability of the two-state solution", EU diplomats in Jerusalem and Ramallah have said. Several other buildings faced a similar ...

The EU "is ready to start work toward applying targeted measures for those members of the security forces involved in torture and other serious violations of human rights" in Venezuela, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said Tuesday. Spain had ...

The leader of Germany's ruling CDU party, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, is to replace Ursula von der Leyen as German defence minister following von der Leyen's elevation to the European Commission presidency, German officials have said. Kramp-Karrenbauer ...

On Tuesday (16 July), the majority of MEPs at the Strasbourg plenary agreed to support Ursula von der Leyen, a long-standing German cabinet minister, for the presidency of the European Commission. With 383 votes in favour, just over the minimum of 374 ...

Malta has said it has enough evidence to put on trial the three men accused of killing Daphne Caruana Galizia, its best-known journalist, a year and a half ago. But the trial will do nothing to shed light on who ordered the killing, her family says, amid ...

The management board of Greece-based EU Agency for Cybersecurity (Enisa) has nominated Juhan Lepassaar as the agency's new executive director, Enisa announced Tuesday. Until June, Lepassaar was head of cabinet for EU commissioner for digital affairs Andrus ...

Malta's attorney general filed indictments on Tuesday against three men accused of murdering journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia with a car bomb in 2017. The suspects, who were arrested shortly after the killing - Vince Muscat, George Degiorgio, and Alfred ...

For some 40 minutes, the European Commission presidential-hopeful Ursula von Der Leyen delivered a speech at the European Parliament in the hope of securing her post. In a packed plenary chamber in Strasbourg, von der Leyen on Tuesday (16 July) first shook ...

Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday spoke to the European Parliament, in a bid to clear the threshold 50 percent in tonight's secret vote of MEPs to endorse her as next Commission president. In a 30 minute speech, she mentioned respecting the rule of law, and ...

Ursula von der Leyen, speaking Tuesday to MEPs as she hopes to become president of the European Commission, said she was open to further delay the UK's departure date from the EU on 31 October. "I stand ready for a further extension of the withdrawal date, ...

EU relations with Turkey hit a new low on Monday (15 July), but European arms sales to its Nato ally continue unabated. The low came when EU foreign ministers imposed diplomatic and financial sanctions on Turkey over its "illegal" gas drilling in Cypriot ...

Ursula von der Leyen, nominee to become president of the European Commission, promised MEPs on Tuesday that if elected she would introduce a carbon border tax, which the current commission administration opposes, but which is a long-standing wish of France ...

Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, the two contenders for the Conservative party leadership, and post of British prime minister, said at a debate on Monday that the Irish backstop is "dead". The backstop is part of the UK-EU Brexit withdrawal deal, aimed at ...

According to EU's foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini Iran's recent steps in the enrichment of uranium "are not significant and can be reversed". After a meeting of the European foreign ministers, she called on Iran "to reverse the steps and go back to ...

"The fact that I had to terminate the second pregnancy was terribly sad," said Warsaw-based Anna, now 39. She was in her tenth week, and her doctors advised her to take a test to check for chromosomal abnormality, which discovered Down's Syndrome. "100 ...

European Commission secretary-general Martin Selmayr will leave his job "at the end of next week", he reportedly told Politico Monday, the same day Ursula von der Leyen, the nominee for president of the commission, reportedly said "there can be only one ...