Euobserver.com

Just 10 countries have administered 75 percent of all Covid vaccines so far - while some 130 poor countries have not yet received a single dose

A letter sent to the European Economic and Social Committee by a group of cross-party MEPs fighting for LGBTi rights expresses fears that a recently-appointed Polish member may try to undermine those rights.

EU foreign affairs ministers will meet in Brussels and are expected to agree to visa-bans and asset-freezes on Russian officials involved in the jailing of opposition figurehead Alexei Navalny.

The stubborn fact is that, election after election - and it's already three consecutive absolute majorities - anti-independence forces cannot convince the majority of Catalans that our democratic rights and a better future can be attained within the Spanish kingdom.

The military coup seems to have inflamed and united a diverse and ostensibly depoliticised society. There seems to be an across the board rejection by the people of Myanmar of a return to military dictatorship.

Jens Stoltenberg, the military alliance's secretary general, said Thursday Nato countries were undecided whether or when to leave Afghanistan, which was invaded by the US and its allies in 2001, Deutsche Welle writes. "If we stay beyond 1 May, we risk more violence, more attacks against our own troops," he said. "But if we leave, then we will also risk that the gains that we have made are lost."

The US has agreed to join EU-brokered talks with Iran and other signatories of an Iran nuclear non-proliferation pact to see if they can revive the deal, a state department spokesman said Thursday. "Until we sit down and talk, nothing's going to happen, but that doesn't mean that when we sit down and talk we're going to succeed," the US said. Former US president Donald Trump scrapped the nuclear deal.

Just 10 percent of Europeans believe the US would intervene on their behalf in the event of a military crisis, despite its obligations under Nato, according to a new poll by the European Council of Foreign Relations, a think-tank. More than two-thirds in all counters polled said the EU needed its own defence capacity instead of relying on America. About half said Europe should stay neutral in a US-China conflict.

Pro-Kremlin oligarchs, including "direct beneficiaries" of Navalny's jailing, will not face EU sanctions for now, diplomatic sources have said.

Hungary has two months to respond, after which the commission can again turn to the EU's top court and ask for Budapest to be fined.

The bloc's new trade strategy proposes making respect for the 2015 Paris Agreement an "essential element" of future trade agreements. Reform of the World Trade Organization is also a priority for the coming decade.

Slovenia's populist prime minister Janez Janša attempted to discredit a Brussels reporter after she published a critical article about the state of media freedoms in the country. The European Commission condemned the PM's language - but refrained from naming him.

The EU Health Security Committee, with representatives of all member states, agreed on Thursday on a list of rapid antigen tests, which member states will mutually recognise, plus standardised data to be included in result certificates. "If negative Covid-19 tests are to be required or recommended for any activity, it is essential that they are mutually-recognised, and result in certificates recognised across the EU," said commissioner Stella Kyriakides.

Over 22 million Europeans were attacked in a 12-month period, but only one-third of victims reported it to the police, a new report revealed on Friday. Young people are at the highest risk of experiencing physical violence, together with LGBTI communities, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities. Men most often face violence in public, while over a third of physical violence against women takes place at home.

Georgian prime minister Giorgi Gakharia on Thursday resigned, while the opposition called for early elections, Reuters reports. Gakharia, who held the post since 2019, said he was stepping down because of a disagreement with his own team over the detention of Nika Melia, a prominent opposition politician. "I believe that confrontation and rivalry within the country endanger the future of Georgia's democratic and economic development," Gakharia wrote on Twitter.

A Belarusian court sentenced two Belarusian journalists from Polish-based TV news channel Belsat who filmed protests against president Alexander Lukashenko to two years in prison, Reuters reports. Katsiaryna Andreyeva, 27, and Darya Chultsova, 23, were detained in an apartment in November from where they had been filming protests taking place over the death of a protester who was killed several days earlier.

Czech president Václav Havel hoped that the region, with its 40-year experience of communism, could play a major and audacious role in the future of a never-changing Europe. That isn't happening.

James Crisp has Boris Johnson's old job in Brussels covering EU affairs for The Daily Telegraph. He often writes with that jaundiced eye on the European project you'd expect from a correspondent on a venerable Conservative UK newspaper.

The EU's asylum support agency, Easo, on Thursday said applications for asylum in the EU (plus Norway and Switzerland) last year were at the lowest levels since 2013. Applications in 2020 decreased by 31 percent, compared to 2019, as a result of emergency travel restrictions, it said. Syrians filed the most applications (64,540), followed by Afghans and Venezuelans.

Most European countries are ignoring mentally ill patients in their Covid-19 vaccine strategies despite such patients being highly vulnerable to contracting the disease and dying from it, leading mental health organisations have warned, Reuters writes. Out of 20 European countries surveyed, only the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, and Denmark were found to recognise severe mental illness as a high-risk medical condition and to have made specific provisions for vaccinating such patients.