Euobserver.com

Police detained over 300 people in Minsk on Sunday, Belarus' interior ministry said, after thousands joined opposition rallies for the 18th consecutive weekend since the disputed election in August. The EU is drawing up a third round of sanctions against the regime of Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko, due to be imposed in mid-December. It blacklisted him and his oldest son, Viktor, last month amid reports of police torture.

Top-level talks between Brussels and London over the weekend failed to bridge gaps in Brexit talks, according to a joint statement by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and British prime minister Boris Johnson Saturday. "Significant differences remain on three critical issues: level playing field, governance, and fisheries," they said, adding that negotiators would resume talks on Monday morning and leaders would speak again by phone on Monday evening.

"How well I'm screwed," was the then Maltese prime minister Joseph Muscat's first thought on 16 October 2017, when he found out his country's best-known journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, had just been murdered by a car bomb.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has continued to bait French president Emmanuel Macron ahead of an EU summit on Turkey relations. "With Macron, France is living in very dangerous times. I hope France gets rid of the Macron problem as soon as possible," Erdoğan said in Istanbul Friday, outside Hagia Sophia, a re-consecrated mosque. Erdoğan earlier called Macron "mentally ill" over a dispute on Macron's crackdown against Islamist radicals.

Belgium has accused Moroccan spies in the 'Great Mosque' next to EU institutions in Brussels of trying to "control Belgian Muslims". "Intelligence services inform me that there is Moroccan interference and espionage in the Great Mosque ... several of the [mosque's] Muslim Executive are Moroccan spies," Belgian justice minister Vincent Van Quickenborne told the VRT radio broadcaster Friday. "They prevent a Belgian Islam from developing here," he also said.

Thousands of Russians began taking their country's 'Sputnik V' coronavirus vaccine in Moscow this weekend, the BBC reported, amid plans to inoculate 1 million this month. Russia is the second European country, after the UK, to roll out vaccinations. EU states aim to start in January after an EU agency has certified safe drugs. The vaccines will be "liquid gold" to organised crime gangs, Interpol's secretary-general Jürgen Stock warned Saturday.

The EU foreign service's secretary general and one of its best-known diplomats, Germany's Helga Schmid, has been named as the next head of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an intergovernmental body that does conflict resolution and election monitoring. Her replacement in the EU foreign service, Stefano Sannino, is an Italian diplomat who used to be in charge of enlargement in the European Commission.

French president Emmanuel Macron has come under fire for entertaining Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sissi at the Élysée place in Paris on Monday despite his egregious human rights record. "French diplomacy has, at the highest levels, long indulged president al-Sisi's brutal repression of any form of dissent," 17 NGOs, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, said. Over 500 French "personalities" signed a similar outcry in France's Le Monde newspaper.

Any post-Brexit deal achieved needs to be ratified by the European Parliament before the end of December (and then by national parliaments), while some member states want to see the agreement translated before they can agree to it.

Belgium revoked residency rights of 16,563 EU nationals between 2008 and 2019, according to Liège University migration scholar Jean-Michel Lafleur.

Denmark's decision to put a deadline on all oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, as part of the country's plan to phase out fossil fuels by 2050, is expected to put pressure on the UK and Norway.

Cambodia, along with authoritarian states like China, now see Hungary not only as a lobbying ally within the EU - but an inspiration as a fellow 'sovereignty'-fundamentalist, who argue no other state has the right to judge their domestic affairs.

The UK, on Thursday, unveiled plans to cut the nation's carbon emissions by at least 68 percent by 2030 (below 1990 levels) ahead of next week's UN Climate Ambition Summit. "We are taking the lead with an ambitious new target to reduce our emissions by 2030, faster than any major economy," said prime minister Boris Johnson. The UK's initial target had been a 53 percent reduction by 2030.

Italy has said people cannot travel from region to region between 21 December and 6 January due to coronavirus after recording the highest daily death total since the pandemic began. "We must eliminate the risk of a third wave which could arrive in January - and not less serious than the first and the second," Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte said on TV Thursday, after 993 people died Wednesday.

French police have targeted 76 mosques in Paris, Lyons, and Marseille with inspections in what French interior minister Gerald Darmanin called "a massive and unprecedented action against separatism" on TV Thursday. All 2,600 registered mosques in France are to be inspected eventually in a crackdown on jihadists following recent killings. But French president Emmanuel Macron's attack on what he has also called "Islamist sepratism" risks a Muslim backlash.

Some press-freedom advocates have voiced "reasonable optimism" that EU justice commissioner Vera Jourová would one day deliver a new law to curb malicious litigation by the rich and powerful against independent media in Europe, after Jourová red-flagged the threat in a democracy "action plan" Thursday. "We know there are discussions on a possible legislative proposal," Linda Ravo, from Berlin-based NGO the Civil Liberties Union for Europe, told EUobserver.

Hackers, most likely from a foreign state, have targeted the EU Commission with bogus emails to steal secrets on Covid-19 vaccines, according to US tech firm IBM.

Swedish prime minister Stefan Lofven has announced that high schools will switch to distance learning from next week, after the country's death toll surpassed 7,000 on Thursday, Reuters reported, "This is being done so as to have a slowing effect on the spread of the disease," Lofven said, warning students that "this is not an extended break for Christmas". The new rule will be in place until early January.

In part of a series of planned measures, the EU Commission plans to better protect free elections in a digital age, strengthen independent media, and counter disinformation.

Azerbaijan has for the first time disclosed that 2,783 of its soldiers were killed in recent fighting over the Nagorno-Karabakh region with Armenia, and that 100 more were still missing. The Azerbaijani defence ministry figures, together with Armenia's, brought the total number of military casualties to 5,208. At least 140 civilians were also killed. Russia, which sent a peacekeeping brigade to enforce the peace deal, said refugees were slowly returning.