Euobserver.com

Listening to European citizens should be a permanent and continuous process - not merely limited to one event which starts on 9 May 2021 and is to finish before the presidential elections in France in the spring of 2022.

The European Commission and BioNTech/Pfizer agreed on Tuesday on accelerating the delivery of 10 million doses during the second quarter of 2021 (April to June). These would be drawn forward from the 100 million additional doses scheduled to be delivered later this year. "These accelerated 10 million doses will bring the total doses of BioNTech/Pfizer in Quarter 2 up to over 200 million," said commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

In Belgium, the coronavirus numbers are going up again. More than 500 people are now in intensive care, which is the highest number since 28 December, De Standaard reports. The number of people admitted to hospitals rose this week by 14 percent, while the number of infections went up by 21 percent. The amount of deaths on the other hand went down by 9 percent.

An Austrian official who chaired the EU Commission's vaccination advisory board, Clemens Martin Auer, has resigned after being verbally masked on radio by Austria's health minister Rudolf Anschober. The official had failed to inform his government there were millions of extra doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine available to purchase and tendered his own resignation, the minister said, amid discontent over the government's handling of the inoculation programme.

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny is being held in a prison camp north-east of Moscow known for its strict control of inmates, a message posted on the opposition politician's Instagram account confirmed, The Guardian writes. "I have to admit that the Russian prison system was able to surprise me," Navalny said, adding: "I had no idea that it was possible to arrange a real concentration camp 100km from Moscow."

Ireland's entry into the Schengen Information System (SIS), announced Monday, will "strengthen law enforcement co-operation and enhance security in Europe", Irish justice minister Helen McEntee said. The database enables police and border guards to see who is wanted for crimes, or has been reported missing, in 26 EU countries, as well as Switzerland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland. It issued some 40,000 alerts on wanted criminals in 2019, Irish police said.

Europe devotes a lot of attention to 'persecuted Christians in the Middle East'. However, Christians aren't persecuted. They are the victims of terror - like anybody else in the region.

Turkey has said it expects to drop all corona-testing restrictions for UK tourists this summer due to the success of Britain's vaccination scheme. "I expect there will be no such requirement from British visitors as the UK government is rapidly, and impressively, rolling out the vaccination program for the whole nation," Turkish health minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said Monday, prompting an immediate surge in British tourist bookings there.

The Vatican has said priests cannot bless same-sex unions and that such blessings are not valid, in a ruling that disappointed gay Catholics who had hoped their Church was becoming more welcoming under Pope Francis, Reuters writes. From the time he was archbishop in his native Argentina, Pope Francis has supported the right of gay couples to have civil legal protections but has always opposed gay marriage.

Data from satellites showed a decline in air pollution in early 2020, when countries introduced nationwide lockdowns to stop the spread of Covid-19. However, one year later, nitrogen dioxide pollution is going back to pre-Covid levels as regular activity resumes. Nitrogen dioxide concentrations in Beijing dropped by around 35 percent between February 2019 and 2020, before returning to similar levels in February 2021, the European Space Agency said on Monday.

The EU's three largest countries have suspended the Oxford/AstraZeneca's Covid vaccine, hours after the World Health Organization (WHO) said it had seen no evidence the shot had caused blood clots in some people who received it. WHO experts are meeting on Tuesday to discuss the crisis, while the the European Medicines Agency is expected to come out with an updated opinion following its emergency talks on Thursday.

The majority of countries in Europe are falling short on tracking coronavirus variants. Only seven member states have increased genome sequencing to the level recommended for detecting and monitoring the emergence and dominance of these strains.

Nearly 230 women and 600 children with EU and UK nationalities remain stuck in dire conditions at camps in north-east Syria. An internal EU document warns of radicalisation if nothing is done to help them.

The EU-UK deal was designed to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland by applying checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain, creating checks on the Irish Sea. London is reluctant to put that into place.

Hamed Ahmadi arrived in Italy to showcase a documentary at the Venice Film Festival. Now he's running a restaurant staffed by refugees, telling their journeys through recipes.

Where there is consensus, it should be welcomed. Critics who lament the Dutch tendency to woolly compromises should be careful what they wish for. Muddling through has served the Netherlands well.

A common vaccination certificate – instead of 27 individual initiatives - can form part of the solution, together with other sanitary measures already in place, to resume travel and tourism and reduce current travel restrictions.

Germany's Christian Democrats slumped to record defeats in two regional votes on Sunday after a muddled coronavirus response, dealing a setback to the party which faces federal elections in September without chancellor Angela Merkel, Reuters reports. In Baden-Wuerttemberg, the Greens won 31.4 percent of the vote and the CDU 23.4 percent, projections showed. In Rhineland-Palatinate, the CDU led in opinion polls until last month but secured only 26.9 percent.

Europe is facing a third wave of corona-infections, amid spikes in numbers in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland, reaching new heights since the start of February. "We are unfortunately facing a new wave of infections," Italian prime minister Mario Draghi said, ahead of a national lockdown starting Monday. "Every 12 minutes night and day, a Parisian is admitted to an intensive care bed," French health minister Olivier Véran said.

The UK failed to inform EU states about 112,490 criminal convictions concerning their nationals on British territory in the past eight years due to a "massive computer failure and subsequent cover-up", revealed by The Guardian newspaper Wednesday. The omissions included 109 killers, 81 rapists, and one man judged guilty of both crimes, posing a potential security risk after they returned home to their EU states having served their sentences.