Euobserver.com

The European Union's Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, told EU ambassadors in Brussels on Tuesday that divisions over fisheries in the Brexit negotiations remain, Reuters reported. Barrier described the latest offer on sharing out fish catches from 2021 as "totally unacceptable". The EU is willing to cut the value of fish caught in UK waters by around 25 percent, while Britain is demanding a 30-35 percent cut, said a diplomat.

UN humanitarian affairs coordinator Mark Lowcock said on Tuesday that European countries would be dealing with Covid-19 in 2022 and beyond, as low-income countries are only expected to gain access to vaccines late next year, The Guardian reported. "It is highly likely the places where the virus finds it is easier to survive longest will be fragile, conflict-affected states with weak institutions, but the virus can get everywhere," Lowcock said.

Jose Manuel Barroso was European Commission president before and after the Lisbon Treaty entered into force in December 2009. He discusses how it impacted his work and the broader implications for an expanding European Union.

"Both referenda weren't about the constitution," Guy Verhofstadt says. "In France, it became a referendum on Jacques Chirac. In the Netherlands, it was about whether they paid too much - something some Dutch politicians have been repeating for 10 years."

It might have made sense economically, but the infamous Bolkestein Directive directly foreshadowed later tensions over migrant workers and highlighted social anxieties that became more dominant after the 2009 economic crisis.

Unfortunately, enforced disappearances are continuing to occur around the world and there is an additional risk of states using the pandemic and associated states of emergency as cover for enforced disappearances.

Member states can start vaccination programmes in the next few days, after EU approved the use of Pfizer and BioTech's Covid-19 drug.

Immigration police in France are monitoring networks of safe houses and believe an estimated 100 sophisticated people-smuggling gangs are targeting the UK, The Times writes. The dismantling of the UK network, thought to have made €1m a month facilitating a "VIP" service, shed light on the inner workings of one of these organisations. There could be about 100 similar gangs offering Channel crossings, the report said.

Several Covid-19 infections have been found in a Chilean military base in Antartica, the only continent that had not been touched by the pandemic so far, the Chilean army announced on Monday, Le Soir reports. "Thirty six men have tested positive, of whom 26 are soldiers and 10 civilians who are working on a maintenance programme on the Antarctic base," a spokesperson of the Chilean army said in a statement.

French, German, and UK foreign ministers have agreed not to set preconditions to a revival of the Iran nuclear deal, amid hopes Tehran and Washington would come back into compliance with the existing accord, instead of trying to amend it, The Guardian reports. The European position emerged amid the first high-level talks by signatories of the non-proliferation deal - France, Germany, the UK, Iran, China, and Russia - since 2018.

The new, more contagious strain of Covid-19 is already in the EU, with Sweden closing its border to Denmark, on top of a UK cordon sanitaire.

Facebook has switched off some of its child-abuse detection tools in Europe in response to new EU rules, the BBC reports. The company said it has had no choice but to do so, since the new privacy directive banned automatic scanning of personal messages. The problem emerged despite warnings from child protection advocates that the new privacy rules effectively stopped automated systems searching for child sexual-abuse images.

Two people smugglers were found guilty on Monday of the manslaughter of 39 Vietnamese men, women, and children who suffocated to death in the back of a refrigerated truck in October last year as they tried to make their way to Britain, Reuters reports. The discovery of so many dead people shocked Europe and Vietnam, showing a dark glimpse of how human trafficking to Europe works.

Together with the Schengen agreement of 1995 which abolished most border controls, the euro is the most important symbol of European unification.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 split Western allies, cost millions of lives, destabilised and radicalised the Middle East - but there is still "no sense of failure" in America.

As enthusiasm for further enlargement withers, Donald Tusk said it's in the EU's interests not to let China or Turkey replace Europe as the "attractive role model" for millions whose dreams of freedom are similar to his from decades ago.

The West's fake moral high ground on climate change is devastating Africa - Europe must stop gaslighting the poor and create an inclusive Green New Deal.

The debate around the plant in Belarus is not about safety. Ensuring safety is paramount. The real choice is whether to let antinuclear bigotry, scaremongering and spin shape policymaking agenda or secure the supply of low-carbon energy into the future.

Details of last week's new EU sanctions on Belarus have shed light on how the regime is trying to crush a peaceful uprising.

The Danish parliament agreed on Sunday to exhume about four million mink, culled over a mutant coronavirus strain earlier this year, over contamination concerns. The announcement comes after some of the mink had resurfaced, triggering a wave of local complains over the potential risk of contaminating drinking water and a nearby lake, according to the DW. The exhumation is expected to start in May next year.