European Union

Britain on Wednesday (30 December) became the first country in the world to approve a coronavirus vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca as it battles a major winter surge driven by a new, highly contagious variant of the virus.

Turkey and Russia have pledged to develop military cooperation despite US sanctions, in a move that risks destabilising Nato.

The United States has registered its first official case of the highly-infectious Covid-19 variant from the UK on Tuesday. Authorities say a man in his 20s from the state of Colorado has been infected. The variant has so far been found in Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, The Netherlands, Pakistan, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.

The European Commission has announced it intends to purchase an extra 100 million doses of Pfizer and BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine. "We will therefore have 300 million doses of this vaccine, which was assessed as safe and effective," said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, in a Tweet on Tuesday. EU officials told Reuters in November that a single dose was priced at €15.5.

Germany registered 1,129 deaths in a span of 24 hours, according to figures provided by the Robert Koch-Institut on Wednesday. It is the highest number of deaths from the disease in Germany since the start of the pandemic. Germany had also detected, over the same 24 hour period, 22,459 new infections. Altogether, some 32,107 people in Germany have died from the disease so far.

Here are some of the key points in the over 1,000-page long agreement on future relations between the UK and the EU.

The NGO Caminando Fronteras said close to 2,200 people died trying to reach Spain throughout 2020, with most deaths taking place on trips to the Canary Islands, reported the AFP new agency. Spain's interior ministry said 19,566 attempted to reach the islands between the first of January and 30 November, compared to 1,993 in 2019. It noted at least 8,000 made the attempt in the month of November alone.

The UK medicines regulator has approved the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine against Covid-19 on Wednesday, which is geared towards helping the elderly. The UK has ordered 100m doses. Oxford/AstraZeneca had a 62 percent efficacy in their largest trial, of 11,636 people, but 90 percent efficacy in a small additional sub-group in the UK numbering 2,741. The vaccine is easier to transport and store than the one produced by Pfizer/BioNTech.

State weather forecaster Météo-France said France had its hottest year in 2020 since recording keeping started in 1900. It added that the average temperature across the country in 2020 was 14 degrees Celsius, surpassing the 2018 record of 13.9 degrees Celsius. "The cooler weather we are seeing at the end of this year will not change anything. It is official... 2020 was the hottest year ever recorded", it said.

The United States and European Union on Tuesday (29 December) demanded that China release a citizen journalist jailed for reports from Wuhan, with top US diplomat Mike Pompeo accusing Beijing of covering up Covid-19.

The EU will double down on its efforts to use the Covid-19 crisis to accelerate the ‘Green’ and digital transitions, fuelled by its €1.95 trillion stimulus, an intense policy agenda and new trade opportunities to improve its global standing.

The US State Department has approved the potential sale of 3,000 precision guided munitions to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in a deal valued at up to $290 billion, the Pentagon said on Tuesday (29 December).

Madrid and London were Tuesday (29 December) negotiating against the clock to preserve the free movement of people across the border between Spain and Gibraltar once the Brexit transition period ends on 31 December.

Trump picked fights with everybody - except Russia and North Korea - in the past four years. But he lost, including his fight with reality, US journalist and historian Anne Applebaum said.

Over one million people seeking refuge arrived in the European Union in 2015 - among them a Malian political activist and poet, who has since been granted asylum in Italy.

In 2016, Britain became the first member state to leave the EU. The referendum sent shockwaves through Europe and changed UK politics. As the first casualties, EU and British citizens have been caught in limbo.

A search for survivors in Croatia stretched into the night Tuesday (29 December) after a powerful earthquake killed at least seven people in the country's interior, tearing down rooftops and piling bricks in the streets.

A Russian court sentenced on Tuesday (29 December) the former chairman of Kazakh BTA Bank's board of directors, Mukhtar Ablyazov, to 15 years in prison, Russian media reported. The story of Ablyazov, a fugitive for years, has been turned into a book as a striking example of the ability of post-Soviet kleptocrats to benefit from Western “hospitality”.

The UK and European Union will Wednesday (30 December) sign a mammoth trade pact to put the seal on their drawn-out Brexit divorce in the dwindling hours before they part ways definitively at the dawning of 2021.

Britain on Tuesday (29 December) announced it had signed an £18.6 billion (€20.5 billion) trade deal with Turkey that “lays the groundwork” for a more comprehensive post-Brexit agreement in the future. Ahead of the signing, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan...