Euobserver.com

The contentious negotiations on the EU's data protection rules (GDPR), very much influenced by intense lobbying from the US, radically changed after whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 that US intelligence services were collecting worldwide user-data.

In 2012, the Norwegian Nobel Committee unanimously decided that developments in Europe after World War II represented the "fraternity between nations" and "peace congresses" cited by Alfred Nobel as criteria for the peace prize in his 1895 will.

EU ambassadors of the 27 member states are meeting on Monday to provisionally apply the agreement, while top MEPs also discuss the way ahead for parliamentary approval.

Most EU member states began rolling out the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against Covid-19 on Sunday, as a more contagious variant from the UK begins to spread on the continent.

Britain and Turkey are to sign a free-trade deal Tuesday, UK trade minister Liz Truss said Sunday, to "provide certainty for thousands of jobs across the UK in the manufacturing, automotive, and steel industries". The agreement is the fifth largest out of 62 bilateral trade accords Britain has signed since Brexit, after its deals with Japan, Canada, Switzerland, and Norway. Britain and Turkey did €20.7bn of trade in 2019.

Ethiopia must investigate and hold accountable gunmen who killed over 100 people in Ethiopia's Benishangul-Gumuz region last week, in what looked like "ethnically targeted violence", the EU foreign service has said. The Benishangul-Gumuz massacre comes amid other fighting in the Tigray region, further north, raising EU concern that Ethiopia is beginning to unravel. "Ongoing reports of non-Ethiopian involvement raise additional worries," the EU foreign service said, on the Tigray-region conflict.

British people arrested overseas on bogus charges have "no legal right to consular assistance", Sarah Broughton, the head of consular affairs at the British Foreign Office, wrote in a letter to the family of British-Iranian dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, obtained by The Times. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was jailed in Iran for sowing dissent. Broughton's letter had "profound implications for all British citizens travelling abroad," the British newspaper said.

Europe could boost biodiversity in its rivers by removing many of the "obsolete" dams, weirs, culverts, fords, sluices and other barriers, 1.2m of which have built up over time, according to EU-funded research by the UK's Swansea University. River-fragmentation in Europe was "much higher" than anticipated, the study found. "Free-flowing rivers are healthy rivers and barrier removal is a simple tool to restore fish species," one of the researchers said.

"In talking of a single currency, [the then European Commission president Jacques] Delors must have had a rush of blood to the head. We are not going to have a single currency," former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher told Irish taoiseach Charles Haughey in June 1990, newly published Irish archives show. "I am not handing over authority to a non-elected [EU] bureaucracy," Thatcher added, calling the EU a communist-type "politburo".

Turkey's decision, last week, to jail journalist Can Dündar for 27 years for "what is his fundamental right to freedom of expression" went in the "opposite direction" of EU human rights demands, the EU foreign service has said. It also urged Turkey to release philanthropist Osman Kavala from pre-trial detention and to free former opposition party leader Selahattin Demirtaş in line with judgements by the European Court of Human Rights.

China will overtake the US as the world's largest economy five years faster than previously expected due to pandemic fallout, according to British consultancy the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). China would leapfrog America in 2028, not 2033, as predicted one year ago, the CEBR said Saturday, because its economy is still growing 2 percent a year, while the US one will shrink by 5 percent this year.

This year's 10 worst weather disasters around the world cost 3,500 lives and caused insured damages worth $150bn (€123bn), international charity Christian Aid has said, raising the alarm on global warming. Just 4 percent of damages in poor countries were insured, aggravating humanitarian problems. "Whether floods in Asia, locusts in Africa, or storms in Europe and the Americas, climate change continued to rage in 2020," Christian Aid's Kat Kramer said.

"I was a very regular girl, working in sales and marketing. No one in my family was politically active. There was no justice anywhere, but we all kept silent. For some reason, I started to feel angry about it."

EU diplomacy has changed from a man with a phone to "a very large ship", but growth in bulk came with loss of agility, French former diplomat, Pierre Vimont, said.

The financial crisis eventually went to the core of the institutional infrastructure of the euro - whose reform is still ongoing a decade later.

Russia announced on Tuesday that it is expanding the list of European officials banned from entering Russia, in response to sanctions imposed by the bloc over the poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny. The Russian foreign ministry described EU sanctions as "a confrontational political decision," saying that their list will include "those who are responsible for promoting anti-Russian sanctions initiatives" in the 27-member bloc.

The European Commission on Tuesday banned the export of plastic waste from the EU to non-OECD countries, except for clean plastic waste sent for recycling. This is part of the new rules applying on the export, import and intra-EU shipment of plastic waste. Last year, the EU exported 1.5m tonnes of plastic waste, mostly to Turkey and Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, India and China.

A new study has found microplastics in the placentas of unborn babies for the first time, with scientists concluding that the particles are likely to have been ingested or breathed in by the mothers, The Guardian reported on Tuesday. "Due to the crucial role of [the] placenta in supporting the foetus's development, the presence of potentially harmful plastic particles is a matter of great concern," researchers said.

France has resumed transport links with the UK, on condition travellers get a negative test result, as the EU tries to contain a new type of Covid-19.

France's top administrative court, the Council of State, ruled on Tuesday that there was "serious doubt over the legality" of police drones surveillance of demonstrations urging Paris police to halt the practice "without delay", the BBC reported. The ruling comes amid parliamentary discussions over a controversial security bill that includes police use of drones. Privacy groups argue that the use of drones to police protests violates freedom of expression.