Euractiv.com

Portugal will "immediately follow up" on the proposal for further clarification of the EU-Mercosur agreement that the European Commission presents, the foreign minister said on Monday, reiterating that he "strongly" expects progress on this matter during the Portuguese presidency.

A proposal for an EU-wide vaccination certificate, due to be presented this month by the European Commission, will allow “resuming normality” in the daily lives of European citizens in the best possible conditions, Portugal's health minister Marta Temido has said.

Global CO2 emissions have returned to pre-pandemic levels, threatening to put climate treaty targets for capping global warming out of reach, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday (2 March).

The European Commission's proposed Euro 7 emission rules on cars, vans, trucks and buses would amount to "a ban through the back door" of internal combustion engines as of 2025, if implemented in their current form, industry has said, calling the proposal premature and "completely out of the question".

Already facing a daunting COVID vaccination challenge, French and German authorities are fighting to convince more people that a jab from the pharma giant AstraZeneca is just as effective as others.

Some 300,000 more jobs are expected to be lost in Spain in 2021, mainly affecting small businesses, in a new blow to the already battered economy, warned the Spanish Association of the Self-Employed Workers (Asociación de Trabajadores Autónomos, ATA). EURACTIV's partner EuroEFE reports.

After his unexpected visit to Tbilisi to mediate the deepening political crisis in Georgia, European Council President Charles Michel said progress in talks between the ruling party and the opposition will be assessed in two weeks.

US President Joe Biden's administration is preparing to impose sanctions on Russia for the poisoning and imprisonment of Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny, CNN reported Monday.

They had no time to lose: A good six months before the German parliamentary elections, the Federation of German Industries (BDI) published its demands to the new government. In the Europe chapter, the focus on climate stands out, EURACTIV Germany reports.

Slovakia is buying 2 million Sputnik V vaccines from Russia and expects half to arrive this month and next as it looks to step up vaccinations amid a surge in COVID-19 infections and deaths, the prime minister said on Monday.

In any civilisation, one commodity is more precious than the others, and it naturally becomes the bedrock of power. Could be salt, could be gold, could be the US dollar. Now it’s the COVID-19 vaccines.

Ethiopian diplomats have stoked a growing diplomatic feud with the European Union after the bloc’s foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, and his envoy, Finland’s Pekka Haavisto, harshly criticised the government’s handling of the conflict in the northern Tigray province.

In an unusual move, European Council President Charles Michel invited Georgia's ruling and opposition parties for talks under his mediation over dinner during his visit to Tbilisi on Monday (1 March).

Portugal's agriculture minister Maria do Céu Antunes will convene by the end of March a joint negotiation meeting with all the three European parliament's rapporteurs to bring about a breakthrough in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) talks.

Until last week, the provincial town of Pokrov outside Moscow, lined with Soviet-era residential blocks and teetering wooden homes, had only one claim to fame: a monument to chocolate.

Hungary's agriculture ministry has launched a scathing attack on the Greens/EFA political group after the publication of a damning report detailing the misuse of EU farming subsidy money in the country. 

Banks in the European Union should publish a "green asset ratio" (GAR) as a core measure of their climate-friendly business activities, the EU's banking watchdog proposed on Monday (1st March).

Europe's current economic model "has no future" and does not respond to "major environmental challenges", Portugal's prime minister António Costa said on Friday, calling for the adoption of new models such as the circular economy and sustainable bioeconomy.

Europe’s drug regulator is auditing the manufacturing site of the Serum Institute of India (SII), a source with knowledge of the matter said, a necessary step before AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine made there can be exported to the bloc.

Dozens of Hong Kong dissidents were charged with subversion on Sunday (28 February) in the largest use yet of Beijing's sweeping new national security law, as authorities seek to cripple the financial hub's democracy movement.