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MEPs voted, on Tuesday, by a huge majority of 536 votes against 156, to reject Marek Opioła, a Polish MP from the ruling, right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, to fill Poland's seat at the EU Court of Auditors, a financial watchdog in Luxembourg. The secret ballot, following Opioła's hearing, did not give reasons, but came amid toxic EU-PiS relations over abuse of rule of law and homophobic politics.

Hungarian MPs passed a law on Tuesday saying only married couples can normally adopt children, while single people can do so only with special permission from the country's 'family affairs' minister. Hungary does not allow same-sex marriages. Its crackdown on LGBTIQ rights comes despite a recent scandal in Brussels, which saw a senior Hungarian ruling-party MEP arrested at a gay sex-party for flouting corona-rules.

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), an EU agency in Paris, should, in future, regulate the way private companies assigned environmental-friendliness ratings to businesses to help guide investors, the Dutch and French market regulators have said in a joint appeal, Reuters reports. "The proposed framework is aimed at preventing misallocation of investments, greenwashing, and ensuring investor protection," they said, adding that "providers of sustainability-related services remain largely unregulated".

EU values commissioner Věra Jourová has told the Financial Times newspaper she will use the recently-agreed powers on rule-of-law conditionality to make sure the bloc's budget is not spent on "the wrong things, the wrong people, the wrong systems' - I mean political systems". She will not be an "activist" on the topic, however, she added. "It will be a stress test also for us [the commission]," she said.

The European Commission, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and Gavi signed a €500m agreement "to secure fair and equitable access" to Covid-19 vaccines for 92 low and middle-income countries, it said in a statement. The deal is part of the Covax Facility aiming to make one billion doses of vaccines available for millions of people. The EU has allocated allocated more than €850m to Covax.

According to IPI's figures, 79 journalists remain behind bars in Turkey. While this is down from a high of over 160 in 2018, the figure still makes Turkey one of the world's leading jailers of journalists.

The European Medicines Agency will assess the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on December 21, earlier than the originally planned date of 29 December. The decision follows public pressure from Germany's health minister Jens Spahn and others. "Our goal is an approval before Christmas," Spahn told reporters earlier Tuesday in Berlin.

The EU's anti-fraud office Olaf says some 140,000 litres of hand-sanitiser from Turkey, tainted with dangerously high levels of methanol, have so far been seized across the EU. Methanol can cause headaches, blurred vision, nausea and vomiting, loss of coordination, and a decreased level of consciousness. It also has direct toxic effect on the optic nerve, and ingestion can lead to blindness.

The efforts by the two nationalist-conservative governments, which have both attacked LGBTIQ-rights and women' rights at home, is causing angst among several member states, who see it as a possible roll-back on gender rights.

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.

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.

The probability of no deal has increased as a last-ditch effort by British prime minister Boris Johnson and EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen did not bridge gaps.

EU leaders will agree to blacklist more Turkish officials at Thursday's summit, but an arms embargo or economic sanctions are "off the table" until at least March.

The possible compromise would delay triggering the new mechanism originally designed to police the rule of law in member states. Legal experts in capitals are "digesting" the draft, one EU diplomat said.

Switzerland has been letting Chinese agents from Beijing's Ministry of Public Security (MPS) secretly travel to the country to interrogate Chinese nationals that the Swiss wanted to deport, under the terms of a "readmission pact" covering the past five years, first published on Wednesday by Spanish NGO Safeguard Defenders. The MPS agents stayed on two-week missions paid for by Swiss taxpayers and produced classified reports for the Swiss government.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said on Wednesday it had been the subject of a cyberattack. The EMA is currently concluding a scientific assessment for the approval of two Covid-19 vaccines, developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. A conclusive opinion is expected within weeks. "The agency has swiftly launched a full investigation, in close cooperation with law enforcement and other relevant entities," EMA said in a statement.

The European Commission on Wednesday defended Fabrice Leggeri, the executive director of the EU's border and coast agency Frontex. Leggeri has been under scrutiny following allegations of pushbacks - with some MEPs demanding his resignation. Asked if they still had confidence in Leggeri, the EU's home affair commissioner Ylva Johansson responded "yes".

The EU's new mobility strategy aims to reduce transport's carbon footprint by 90 percent by 2050 - with the electrification of road transport, the use of biofuels and more high-speed rail traffic. But no ban on short-haul flights.