European Union

The Bulgarian government accused the North Macedonian government on Wednesday of waging a diplomatic and media campaign to discredit Bulgaria’s positions, warning Macedonians that if they do not change their “totalitarian narrative”, they will not receive support for the start...

Representatives of the Polish government confirmed Warsaw is willing to give up its veto at Thursday’s European Council in Brussels. “We expect that the latest findings will confirm that conditionality only serves to protect the budget. We also expect a...

An effort to stop President Donald Trump’s high-tech weapons deals with the UAE fell short in the US Senate as Trump’s fellow Republicans opposed resolutions of disapproval seeking to block the sale of drones and advanced F-35 fighter jets.

Almost half of the hotels in Portugal plan to close by the end of the year and groups with several hotels admit to closing 56% of them due to the pandemic’s impact, the Portuguese Hotel Association (AHP) said on Wednesday....

Europe needs to approve the EU Recovery Fund in the shortest possible time, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte told the Chamber of Deputies, adding that “citizens will not forgive a contradiction of the historical agreement, which signals a deep and...

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the exiled leader of the Belarusian opposition, has called on European countries to follow Lithuania in investigating crimes committed by the regime in Belarus. “We encourage all other countries to follow this initiative of the Lithuanian prosecutor and...

Ireland’s Tánaiste, Leo Varadkar, touched base with EPP members of the European Parliament on Wednesday, as part of a video call on the ongoing trade negotiations between the UK and the EU. The call came hours ahead of a crunch...

The very dense and controversial government bill of around 50 articles aiming to “guarantee respect for the laws and principles of the Republic” by targeting the financing of associations and places of worship, education and gender equality was presented on...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel pleaded for people in Germany to reduce their contacts and urged caution ahead of the holidays in a rare emotional speech during Wednesday’s general debate in the Bundestag. “If we now have too many contacts before...

For the first time in Sweden’s history the so-called “NATO-option” has obtained a majority in parliament, meaning that while the country edges closer to Finland’s defence and security policy which has the ‘NATO-option’ as its cornerstone, it is also keeping...

The current pandemic crisis serves as a magnifying glass of all existing inequalities in Europe - racism, gender and sexual discrimination, treatment of migrants: there is still a long way to go to ensure full and real equality in Europe, write Helena Dalli and Dunja Mijatović on the occasion of the Human Rights Day on 10 December.

Two-thirds of Paris Agreement signatories are using or considering carbon pricing schemes to achieve their emission reduction targets. The EU, China, and the USA should lead a worldwide “carbon pricing coalition” for the period 2030-2050, argue Jyrki Katainen and Karl-Henrik Sundström.

Two pharmaceutical companies in line for first conditional approval for their Covid-19 vaccine by the EU's medicine regulator said Wednesday (9 December) their documents were "unlawfully accessed" during a cyberattack on a European Medicines Agency server.

As the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) became operational last month, a Greek official stated that his country had become the most important hub for gas from sources other than Russia in Southeastern Europe, also thanks to its LNG terminals.

Bucharest will host a new cyber-research centre designed to help protect EU assets from foreign hackers, after a vote by EU states Wednesday. The European Cybersecurity Competence Center will distribute EU project funds around Europe. "Romania's capital will take this task in a responsible and dedicated manner," its EU ambassador tweeted. Belgium, Germany, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, and Spain had also competed to host the new centre.

If the EU and UK clinched a last-minute Brexit deal, there would not be enough time to ratify it by 1 January, when a transition period expires, because the EU had 35 legislatures, including regional ones, which needed to sign off on it, an EU diplomat said Wednesday. But a "pragmatic" solution could be to designate the new agreement an EU-level treaty, to sign off by ministers at one stroke.

Forty two journalists and media workers have been killed while doing their jobs this year, according to the International Federation of Journalists' annual tally, the Guardian reports. A further 235 are in prison in cases related to their work, the report showed. Mexico topped the 2020 list of countries where the most journalists were killed for the fourth time in five years, with 13 killings, followed by Pakistan with five.

EU-based banks and EU consumption is helping to fuel the rapacious destruction of the climate-critical Amazon rainforest, writes Giulia Bondi.

France is to tighten restrictions on clandestine home-schooling and online hate speech under a new bill approved by the French cabinet Wednesday, in reaction to recent jihadist killings. It will also extend bans on wearing religious symbols by state employees and restate a ban on polygamy. The "law of protection" was "not aimed against religions or against the Muslim religion in particular", French prime minister Jean Castex said.