Euractiv.com

France hopes its current debate on having the right to abortion enshrined in the Constitution would inspire its EU counterparts, French Gender Equality and Diversity Minister Aurore Bergé said at the informal meeting of gender equality ministers in Brussels on Tuesday.

Spain’s former transport minister José Luis Ábalos announced his resignation from Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party (PSOE) on Tuesday but will remain a member of parliament despite revelations that his former aide claimed millions in commissions for supplying face masks during the worst months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

To resolve the decades-long conflict between the two countries, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock will hold bilateral and trilateral talks with her Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts on Wednesday and Thursday in Berlin.

At least 576,000 people in the Gaza Strip - one quarter of the population - are one step away from famine, a senior UN aid official told the Security Council on Tuesday (27 February), warning that widespread famine could be "almost inevitable" without action.

The legacy of Germany’s first-ever three-way coalition is jeopardised by continuous infighting, Green agriculture minister Cem Özdemir warned on Tuesday as the Greens worry about the government’s performance and tight public finances.

Bulgaria’s government has not given up on the possibility of suing Russia’s state-owned Gazprom for cutting off gas supplies two months after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

The European Commission is probing if Microsoft is preventing customers from relying on certain security software from its competitors, according to a document that regulators sent to at least one rival in January, seen by Reuters.

Europe's wind firms have faced a bleak period of supply chain setbacks, inflation and equipment problems - although Danish turbine manufacturer Vestas (VWS.CO) returned to profit in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Rare Disease Day, 29 February, marks a moment when an estimated 30 million people living with rare diseases across Europe gain a louder voice. Europe now has a generational opportunity to scale up programmes capable of improving millions of lives.

The Bulgarian parliament has paused a €50 billion healthcare investment strategy until 2030, despite struggling with excessively high mortality and recording the largest negative population growth in the European Union.

The European Parliament decided to ban Amazon representatives from accessing its buildings on Tuesday (27 February), due to multiple events where the global retailing giant did not attend meetings requested by members of the European Parliament, press service confirmed Euractiv.

EU farmers' organisations welcomed a vote in the European Parliament's Agriculture Committee calling for more safeguards against food imports in the context of a recent Commission proposal for renewing trade liberalisation measures for Ukraine.

Belgium is throwing a last-ditch attempt to get the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) over the finish line in a vote on Wednesday (28 February) despite tenacious reservations from key member states, including Germany and Italy.

France’s government announced it will hold a parliamentary debate on the situation in Ukraine, with President Emmanuel Macron under heavy fire after he claimed on Monday (26 February) that no options - including sending troops on the ground - should be excluded in ensuring Ukraine’s victory against Russia.

Several EU capitals, including Berlin, Warsaw, and Madrid, dismissed on Tuesday (27 February) remarks by French President Emmanuel Macron, who had suggested that a future deployment of Western troops in Ukraine should not be ultimately "ruled out". 

Despite Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s attempts to tame Catalonia's independence movement, its President Pere Aragonès told Euractiv that his ultimate goal is still for the Socialists to yield and hold a self-determination referendum.

EU member states do not seem to consider as a priority the Belgian EU Council Presidency's compromise proposal to revise the EU's Energy Taxation Directive, meaning it may not be finalised before the EU elections in June.

On 18 March 2016, Russian dissident Alexei Navalny participated in a live TV debate with Vladimir Pozner, one of Russia’s most famous journalists, on the issue of media censorship.

The European Parliament approved with an overwhelming majority a law protecting journalists and human rights advocates from abusive legal proceedings designed to stifle freedom of speech, marking the end of a six-year push to get the law across the line.

Fruit and vegetables in the EU are increasingly contaminated with toxic PFAS - the so-called ‘forever chemicals' that the Commission dropped plans to ban last year -  a study by the European Pesticides Action Network (PAN Europe) has found.