Euobserver.com

Turkey and Russia have pledged to develop military cooperation despite US sanctions, in a move that risks destabilising Nato.

The United States has registered its first official case of the highly-infectious Covid-19 variant from the UK on Tuesday. Authorities say a man in his 20s from the state of Colorado has been infected. The variant has so far been found in Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, The Netherlands, Pakistan, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.

The European Commission has announced it intends to purchase an extra 100 million doses of Pfizer and BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine. "We will therefore have 300 million doses of this vaccine, which was assessed as safe and effective," said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, in a Tweet on Tuesday. EU officials told Reuters in November that a single dose was priced at €15.5.

Germany registered 1,129 deaths in a span of 24 hours, according to figures provided by the Robert Koch-Institut on Wednesday. It is the highest number of deaths from the disease in Germany since the start of the pandemic. Germany had also detected, over the same 24 hour period, 22,459 new infections. Altogether, some 32,107 people in Germany have died from the disease so far.

Here are some of the key points in the over 1,000-page long agreement on future relations between the UK and the EU.

The NGO Caminando Fronteras said close to 2,200 people died trying to reach Spain throughout 2020, with most deaths taking place on trips to the Canary Islands, reported the AFP new agency. Spain's interior ministry said 19,566 attempted to reach the islands between the first of January and 30 November, compared to 1,993 in 2019. It noted at least 8,000 made the attempt in the month of November alone.

The UK medicines regulator has approved the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine against Covid-19 on Wednesday, which is geared towards helping the elderly. The UK has ordered 100m doses. Oxford/AstraZeneca had a 62 percent efficacy in their largest trial, of 11,636 people, but 90 percent efficacy in a small additional sub-group in the UK numbering 2,741. The vaccine is easier to transport and store than the one produced by Pfizer/BioNTech.

State weather forecaster Météo-France said France had its hottest year in 2020 since recording keeping started in 1900. It added that the average temperature across the country in 2020 was 14 degrees Celsius, surpassing the 2018 record of 13.9 degrees Celsius. "The cooler weather we are seeing at the end of this year will not change anything. It is official... 2020 was the hottest year ever recorded", it said.

Donald Trump picked fights with everybody - except Russia and North Korea - in the past four years. But he lost, including in his fight with the truth, US journalist and historian Anne Applebaum said.

Over one million people seeking refuge arrived in the European Union in 2015 - among them a Malian political activist and poet, who has since been granted asylum in Italy.

In 2016, Britain became the first member state to leave the EU. The referendum sent shockwaves through Europe and changed UK politics. As the first casualties, EU and British citizens have been caught in limbo.

Gibraltar's chief minister Fabian Picardo has welcomed the post-Brexit trade deal between the UK and the EU, but warned it did not apply to his territory. "This deal does not cover Gibraltar. For us, and for the people of the Campo de Gibraltar around us, the clock is still ticking," Picardo said in a statement, reported the Associated Press. Gibraltar is a British colony off the southern coast of Spain.

The Paris-based international rights group Reporters Without Borders, on Monday, in a report, said that 50 journalists had been killed in the past year. It said most killings happened in countries not at war. "More journalists are being killed in countries considered to be 'at peace'," the report said. Most happened in Mexico, followed by India, the Philippines, and Honduras.

Talks had been stuck for years, but tensions between a Trump-led US and China may have helped change the Chinese position.

Saudi Arabia has jailed a prominent women's rights activist, Loujain al-Hathloul, despite a global outcry, including by European NGOs. The court sentenced her to over five years in prison after she was arrested in 2018 for campaigning for women to have the right to drive cars. And it aggravated Riyadh's human-rights pariah reputation, even though most EU states trade in arms and oil as normal with the Western ally.

Bruno Roger-Petit, an advisor to French president Emmanuel Macron, has defended having had lunch, in October, with well-known French far-right politician Marion Maréchal, after their meeting became public Sunday. "I wanted to know what she had to say and whether it echoed the state of [national] opinion - which it did not. I found out that we disagreed," Roger-Petit said Monday, after facing a barrage of criticism from liberal politicians.

The EU is still several months away from having enough vaccines to inoculate its 450 million people, with Pfizer and BioNTech, its principle suppliers, aiming for September for delivery targets.

Asylum seekers are living in misery in an EU-funded camp on the outskirts of Athens, with no running water or even containers to sleep in, nine months after construction began.

EU ambassadors of the 27 member states on Monday in Brussels approved the provisional application of the EU-UK trade deal struck last week. The 27 governments will now approve it in writing by Tuesday afternoon, a formal step before the agrement can enter into force next month. The provisional application will end in February as the European Parliament is expected to give the deal its final green light in January.

20 February 2014, and snipers had just opened fire on protesters in Maidan square in Kiev, in the final act of a revolution which led, one day later, to the fall of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and to Russia's invasion.