European Union

France's health ministry will have to defend its decision to integrate the medical portal Doctolib, which uses Amazon's hosting services, into its online booking system for COVID-19 vaccinations before France's top court, EURACTIV France reports.

Portugal's foreign minister Augusto Santos Silva said the first discussion among EU member states over the European Union's future trade policy was "an excellent starting point," although tough debates on trade and climate policy have yet to be addressed.

The European Union aims to increase the region's COVID-19 vaccine production capacity to 2-3 billion doses per year by the end of 2021, Industry Commissioner Thierry Breton was quoted as saying on Wednesday (3 March).

As the European Commission is about to unveil the EU's new Strategy on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for the next decade, Krzysztof Pater writes about one of the areas where discrimination is still acutely felt – the right to vote, effectively denied to many persons with disabilities across Europe.

Spanish unemployment figures in February reached their highest level since April 2016 as the country reels from the economic impact of the pandemic, EURACTIV's media partner  EuroEFE reported.

The UK failed to inform EU states about 112,490 criminal convictions concerning their nationals on British territory in the past eight years due to a "massive computer failure and subsequent cover-up", revealed by The Guardian newspaper Wednesday. The omissions included 109 killers, 81 rapists, and one man judged guilty of both crimes, posing a potential security risk after they returned home to their EU states having served their sentences.

Egypt and Sudan called for international mediation on Tuesday to reach a legally binding agreement with Ethiopia on the filling and operating the of Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram writes. This mediation should involve the UN, the African Union, the EU, and the US. The EU stated that it was ready to play a bigger role on condition that all parties involved agreed to it.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told EU ambassadors in Ankara Tuesday he would "strengthen the rule of law based on human rights" in Turkey with new judicial appeals and electoral laws. He told French president Emmanuel Macron by video-link the same day that as "two strong Nato allies" they had "serious potential" to cooperate on Middle East security and counter-terrorism. The pro-EU overtures come after recent EU mini-sanctions on Turkey.

America has sanctioned Russia for the attempted murder and jailing of opposition figure Alexei Navalny, in a show of return to transatlantic unity.

The EU’s ambassador to Venezuela left the South American country on Tuesday (2 March) after she was expelled last week over a diplomatic spat related to new sanctions. Isabel Brilhante Pedrosa, who is Portuguese, left Venezuela aboard a Turkish Airlines...

Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz said his country and Denmark plan to stop relying solely on the European Union for coronavirus jabs, Deutsche Welle reports. Kurz said both countries plan to work with Israel to produce second-generation vaccines. While Israel has vaccinated a large part of its population, the EU has faced criticism for its slow vaccine rollout and slow approval of the vaccines themselves.

Judges applying to join Poland's Supreme Court should have the right to appeal against the opinions of a body reviewing candidates, the EU's top court said Tuesday, part of an ongoing rift between the EU and Warsaw. The EU court also said that amendments to the law on the National Council of the Judiciary, which in effect remove judicial review of its decisions, including judges' appointments, could infringe EU law.

The European Commission on Tuesday launched an investigation into whether German plans to compensate lignite-fired power plants for being phased out earlier than foreseen are aligned with EU state aid rules. Under the German coal phase-out law, coal will have to end by 2038. But Germany has agreed to pay €4.35bn to the main producers of lignite-fired electricity for the early closure of power plants.

France will allow people under 75 with existing health problems to get the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, the health minister said, changing the country's earlier stance that the vaccine should be for the under-65s only, Reuters reports. France hopes to speed up its vaccination campaign. As of Saturday, 4.55 million people had received at least one shot of vaccine, compared to 6.17 million in Germany and up to 20.9 million in Britain.

Saudi Arabia's crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and other high-ranking Saudi officials have been accused of committing crimes against humanity in a criminal complaint filed in Germany by Reporters without Borders (RSF), the press freedom group, The Guardian writes. The complaint focusses on the "widespread and systematic" persecution of journalists in Saudi Arabia, including the arbitrary detention of 34 journalists there and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

The special committee on foreign interference was created in June with the aim of assessing the foreign threat to European democracy - and identify possible tools to fight it.

Earlier this month the European Parliament set up a permanent probe into the EU's border agency Frontex. Now that the Frontex boss is set for his first grilling, MEPs have decided to keep the public in the dark.

The Nordic electricity market is an example of successful market integration plus climate action, as the share of sustainable energy keeps growing, the European Commission said. However, the decarbonisation of the transport sector remains a challenge.

The EU is driving a hard "EU-first" policy on vaccines and almost nobody talks about it. Maybe because there is a lot of sugar-coating put on a hard and ruthless policy.

These are dark times in Belarus, with the government tightening the screws like never before. They are preparing for spring just as much as the opponents of the regime are.