Euobserver.com

Gibraltar's chief minister Fabian Picardo has welcomed the post-Brexit trade deal between the UK and the EU, but warned it did not apply to his territory. "This deal does not cover Gibraltar. For us, and for the people of the Campo de Gibraltar around us, the clock is still ticking," Picardo said in a statement, reported the Associated Press. Gibraltar is a British colony off the southern coast of Spain.

The Paris-based international rights group Reporters Without Borders, on Monday, in a report, said that 50 journalists had been killed in the past year. It said most killings happened in countries not at war. "More journalists are being killed in countries considered to be 'at peace'," the report said. Most happened in Mexico, followed by India, the Philippines, and Honduras.

Talks had been stuck for years, but tensions between a Trump-led US and China may have helped change the Chinese position.

Saudi Arabia has jailed a prominent women's rights activist, Loujain al-Hathloul, despite a global outcry, including by European NGOs. The court sentenced her to over five years in prison after she was arrested in 2018 for campaigning for women to have the right to drive cars. And it aggravated Riyadh's human-rights pariah reputation, even though most EU states trade in arms and oil as normal with the Western ally.

Bruno Roger-Petit, an advisor to French president Emmanuel Macron, has defended having had lunch, in October, with well-known French far-right politician Marion Maréchal, after their meeting became public Sunday. "I wanted to know what she had to say and whether it echoed the state of [national] opinion - which it did not. I found out that we disagreed," Roger-Petit said Monday, after facing a barrage of criticism from liberal politicians.

The EU is still several months away from having enough vaccines to inoculate its 450 million people, with Pfizer and BioNTech, its principle suppliers, aiming for September for delivery targets.

Asylum seekers are living in misery in an EU-funded camp on the outskirts of Athens, with no running water or even containers to sleep in, nine months after construction began.

EU ambassadors of the 27 member states on Monday in Brussels approved the provisional application of the EU-UK trade deal struck last week. The 27 governments will now approve it in writing by Tuesday afternoon, a formal step before the agrement can enter into force next month. The provisional application will end in February as the European Parliament is expected to give the deal its final green light in January.

It was 20 February 2014, and snipers had just opened fire on protesters in Kiev, in the final act of a revolution which led, one day later, to the fall of Ukraine's pro-Russian regime.

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.