Euobserver.com

An outcry from major European city governments - including Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona and Budapest - has helped shelve an EU Commission power grab over municipalities' services industries, such as in affordable housing, energy supply and waste management.

Kosovo president Hashim Thaçi resigned Thursday following confirmation he was being charged with war crimes by an EU-sponsored special tribunal in The Hague, the AP news agency reports. He did it to protect the "integrity" of the presidential office, he said. "Kosovo was the victim and Serbia was the aggressor," he added, referring to Kosovo's war of independence from Serbia in the late 1990s, when he was a guerrilla leader.

Relations between France and Turkey risked further deterioration after the Turkish foreign ministry vowed to retaliate against a French decision to ban the activities, on its territory, of the Grey Wolves, an ultra-nationalist group affiliated with Turkey's ruling AKP party. "We will respond in the firmest way possible to this decision," the Turkish ministry said Wednesday. The Grey Wolves "incites discrimination and hatred" French interior minister Gerald Darmanin said.

Four Italian regions are being put under a "red-zone" lockdown, with severe limitations on people leaving their homes, the country's prime minister Giuseppe Conte announced Wednesday night. Lombardy, Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta in the north, and Calabria in the south will see strict measures for two weeks, aimed at slowing down a surge in Covid-19 infections, AP reported.

Strict measures against the spread of Covid-19 will have to remain in force in Belgium until there is a vaccine available, the country's prime minister Alexander De Croo warned on Wednesday. De Croo said that "we will have to be a lot stricter with [the measures] than during the summer until there is a vaccine." He added that strict measures will have to remain in force "for months to come."

The pro-European candidate, Joe Biden, is on the cusp of victory in US elections, with Germany leading attacks on Donald Trump's "awful" claims of voting fraud.

Denmark has found a new strain of Covid-19 after an outbreak in the country's mink population led to a mutation of the virus that might hamper an effective vaccine, the country's prime minister Mette Frederiksen warned Wednesday. She said "there is a risk that the effect of a future vaccine will be weakened or, in a worst case scenario, be undermined." Denmark plans to cull its 15 million mink population.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Periscope, YouTube and TikTok were fined by Turkish authoirties for failing to appoint a representative able to address complaints, as required by a new law.

Maia Sandu, Moldova's pro-EU former prime minister, won the first round of voting in Sunday's election, setting the stage for a run-off against pro-Russian incumbent Igor Dodon.

MEPs on the environment committee on Tuesday voted to increase green expenditure in the coronavirus recovery facility from 37 to 47 percent, and to exclude fossil fuel projects from receiving any funding from the package. 'Green' spending must be based on the EU's new sustainable finance law, MEPs said.

EU countries adopted on Tuesday common risk standards for restrictions on free movement in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, aiming to increase "transparency and predictability" for citizens and businesses. "It is our common duty to ensure coordination on any measures which affect free movement and to give our citizens all the information they need when deciding on their travel," said Michael Roth, Germany's minister for European affairs.

The pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson has paused its Covid-19 vaccine trial after a participant experienced an "unexplained illness," The Guardian reported Tuesday. Earlier this month, the European Commission, on behalf of EU member states, signed an agreement for 200 million doses of the company's coronavirus vaccine candidate. In September, another trial for a potential vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University was paused for a second time.

Turkish petro-exploration ship, the Oruç Reis, sailed back into a Greek-claimed maritime zone on Monday, prompting outrage by Athens. The Reis will come close to outlying Greek islands on a 10-day mission in what "constitutes a major escalation and direct threat to peace and security in the region", the Greek foreign ministry said. Turkey was "provocatively indifferent" to Europe's appeals for de-escalation, Greece added, amid talk of future EU sanctions.

Norway has granted asylum to a Polish man on grounds of political persecution in the first such case since the fall of communism 30 years ago. It said Rafał Gaweł, who used to run an anti-racism NGO and who was charged with fraud and forgery, would not have gotten a fair trial because Poland's right-wing government had seized control of the judiciary, echoing EU concerns on Polish rule-of-law.

President Alexander Lukashenko is going back on an EU blacklist, as Belarusian police gets permission to use live ammunition against protesters.

US social-media firm Facebook has, for the first time, formally banned "any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust" from its worldwide platform. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, said he had "struggled with the tension" between free speech and hate crime, but the new policy was "the right balance". "My own thinking has evolved as I've seen data showing an increase in antisemitic violence," he said on Monday.

EU countries are to impose modest sanctions on Russia for its second use of a prohibited chemical weapon in Europe.

The decrease of revenues in 2020 of subnational authorities in France, Germany and Italy alone is estimated to be €30bn for the three countries, a new report by the European Committee of the Regions says.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson announced on Monday a three-tier system aimed at avoiding a patchwork of complicated and confusing coronavirus rules across England, Reuters reported. Restrictions include shutting pubs, bars, gyms, leisure centres, betting shops and adult gaming centres in areas deemed "very high" alert level. "We must act to save lives," Johnson told MPs, who now have to agree the proposal. Scotland and Wales have devolved administrations.

In city elections in Vienna the far-right anti-immigration Freedom Party (FPÖ), plummeted to 7.5 percent, down from nearly 31 percent in 2015, Deutsche Welle reports. The party, led by disgraced far-right politician, Heinz-Christian Strache, will not enter the city's parliament. Strache was involved in a high-profile corruption scandal. The biggest winner was the centre-left SPÖ, led by Mayor Michael Ludwig, with 41.7 percent of the vote.