European Union

Since the beginning of the week,  cafes and restaurants with open-air spaces, as well as beaches have opened in Hungary outside of Budapest, where strict restrictions continue to apply. This has prompted many Hungarians with summer homes outside the capital to consider leaving the city for the countryside.

For the newly established European Public Prosecutor's Office to be a real game-changer, it must have sufficient financial resources and enough full-time European delegated prosecutors to conduct independent investigations in the member states, chief prosecutor Laura Codruța Kövesi said in her first exclusive interview in the new position.

German court ruling gives ECB a fright, global leaders pull together with all of their might, and in some places it seems a lockdown end is in sight.

From Sunday (10 May), Belgian citizens will be allowed to receive up to four other people at home, always the same ones. Upon announcing the new relaxed measure, experts and politicians said the government is counting on people’s common sense...

Estonia is marking 75 years since the end of WW2 on European soil on Friday at a vide-meeting of the UN Security Council, which it currently chairs. The event, which is public and live-streamed, will discuss "lessons learned to prevent future atrocities" and "the responsibility of the Security Council", which has failed to stop egregious war crimes in Syria in recent times. US historian Timothy Snyder will also take part.

Worldwide, there are now 3.86m people confirmed to be infected by the coronavirus, of which 1.22m have officially recovered, Reuters reports. The total number of deaths stands at 268,554. The United States counts for the highest number of cases - 1.26m. Per capita, Qatar has the highest number of cases: 667 cases per 100,000 people. Belgium has the highest number of deaths: 71.

Polish ruling party chairman Jarosław Kaczyński is trying to turn the country into a Roman Catholic dictatorship, Poland's former foreign minister has said.

Four in 10 British pubs face going out of business by September unless they get further financial support from the government to compensate them for lost business from the coronavirus pandemic.

A plan to relocate, from Greece, 1,600 unaccompanied minors seeking asylum to other member states have so far netted 59 transfers. Twelve minors have been sent to Luxembourg and 47 to Germany. The European Commission says Portugal and Slovenia are next to take some in. They hope to relocate the remaining minors over the next few months.

The final report for Finland's two-year basic income experiment carried over the course of 2017 and 2018 was published on Wednesday (6 May).

Yesterday, the French government unveiled a deconfinement plan that would kick off on Monday (11 May), which will have the country divided into two zones. EURACTIV France looks into what this partial deconfinement plan will look like.

MEPs said the Czech PM should fully resolve the possible conflict of interest in a company that receives EU funds - or resign.

Such claims, based on internal reports four years ago, fall far from the truth, and are mainly based on conjectures and presumptions. The so-called 'Chinese espionage menace' is nothing new and has time and again been proven fictitious.

Support services for victims and witnesses, the police and other relevant authorities are stretched to the limits because of staff shortages, travel restrictions or other demands related to Covid-19.

The European Commission is floating plans to beef up the fight against money-laundering, including possibly giving a supervisor role to the European Banking Authority. Yet the authority's board refused to act on a €200bn money-laundering scandal involving Danske Bank.

The EU's foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell called agreeing to Chinese censorship on the origins of coronavirus "misguided". Nevertheless, he said diplomacy works like that in China.

"The coronavirus has ending blowing up the model of global multilateral governance that has been functioning over the past few years," EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell told a group of reporters on Thursday.

For the second time in a week, journalists in Berlin have been attacked by anti-lockdown protesters, Deutsche Welle reports. Each time a TV crew with camera were attacked when they approached a group of people protesting against measures to contain the coronavirus. Germany's foreign minister Heiko Maas condemned the attacks, saying on Twitter "those who attack journalists also attack our democracy."

Prime minister Edouard Philippe said on Thursday that France does not rule out of re-imposing a lockdown if coronavirus cases increase, Reuters reported. "We have always said that we would rather not have to, if possible, resort [to a new lockdown] but also that, in the event that there was no other option, we would not rule it out," Philippe said. French lockdown will be partially lifted on Monday.

Belgium's supermarkets have seen an increase in takings of more than €500m since the lockdown was installed mid-March, Le Soir writes. Compared to last year that is an increase of 10 percent. The uptick in sale was mainly for alcohol, food and cleaning products. At the beginning of the lockdown, people massively over-bought toilet paper and frozen foods, but those sales are today back to normal.