European Union

Under-60s who have received their first dose of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine will have the possibility of receiving a different vaccine as their second dose, Italy’s national drug agency (Aifa) decided on Monday. The announcement comes after the AstraZeneca and...

At a meeting on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Brussels, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vowed to de-escalate tensions. “The meeting was a step towards a quieter summer,” Greek government sources said....

The announcement on 9 June by Norway’s petroleum and energy ministry inviting oil companies to apply for exploration blocks has upset environmental groups, including Greenpeace. The blocks available are situated on the country’s continental shelf in the “mature”, so-called predefined...

Dublin officials are worried that continued uncertainty over the Northern Ireland Protocol could further escalate tensions between the UK and the EU. A breakthrough between the EU and UK would still be possible “if there’s a will there on both...

Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg met with his Maltese counterpart Evarist Bartolo in Valletta on Monday to discuss migration policy and the situation in Libya with the ministers agreeing that they should not have to wait for a common EU...

Germany’s health and justice ministers asked the premiers of Germany’s 16 states to start dropping mask-wearing restrictions, but both Chancellor Angela Merkel and various regional leaders called for greater “discipline and care”. The debate comes against the background spread of...

The EU's 27 energy ministers on Friday (11 June) came to an uneasy compromise on the revision of EU rules covering investments in cross-border energy infrastructure, the so-called TEN-E regulation. The fraught debate sets an unwelcome precedent for future debates over gas.

Negotiations to attempt to align the next phase of the Common Agricultural Policy to the EU Green Deal drag on. Yet the goal of a truly sustainable European agricultural policy will only be achieved alongside a courageous trade policy, argues Thilo Bode.

The pandemic has worsened corruption across the European Union, Transparency International said Tuesday (15 June), with citizens at times needing personal connections to get medical care and some governments using the crisis for their own gain.

On the eve of his bilateral meeting with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, US President Joe Biden told NATO allies he would tell Moscow he was not looking for conflict with Russia, but that NATO would respond if Russia continued its...

Thousands of people took to the streets of the Hungarian capital to protest ahead of a vote in parliament on Tuesday (15 June) on a package of laws lumping sexual minorities in with paedophiles and seeking to erase homosexuality and...

China has, for the first time, joined Russia as an explicit danger to Western allies after a Nato summit in Brussels on Monday.

Some Western journalists, including the BBC, walked out of a press conference in Minsk Monday when Belarus authorities again paraded political prisoner Roman Protasevich, forcing him to say he had not been mistreated and to apologise for his alleged crimes. Belarus air-force chief Igor Golub also denied having forced down a Ryanair flight carrying Protasevich to Vilnius, despite multiple independent accounts confirming that one of Belarus' warplanes was involved.

The EU and US are hoping to announce the end of a 17-year long dispute on subsidies for aircraft makers Boeing and Airbus at a summit in Brussels on Tuesday, according to officials and diplomats speaking to the Financial Times newspaper. The deal, which was still being consulted with Berlin, Madrid, and Paris on Monday, involved a multi-year limit on state aid and stripping away recent punitive tariffs.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has refused to guarantee opposition leader Alexei Navalny would survive his prison term. "As far as health, all individuals who are in prison, that is something that the administration of the specific prison or penitentiary establishment is responsible for," Putin said Monday, when asked about Navalny by US broadcaster NBC ahead of a US summit and after trying to have Navalny killed with a chemical weapon.

French president Emmanuel Macron and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have agreed the mostly Syrian mercenaries there should leave Libya, in the margins of Monday's Nato summit in Brussels. "It doesn't just depend on the two of us. [But] president Erdoğan confirmed during our meeting his wish that the foreign mercenaries, the foreign militias, operating on Libyan soil leave as soon as possible," Macron told press.

The EU has historically been a major energy importer, with a majority of its oil and gas coming from Russia or the Middle East. Now, as Europe decarbonises its industry, some countries fear it could increasingly become dependent on imported hydrogen.

The EU on Monday began selling the first bonds backing its €800bn Covid-19 recovery fund, budget commissioner Johannes Hahn said. The sale of the 10-year bond is the start of the debt-issuance between now and 2026, which will back grants and loans EU governments need to boost their recovery. The sale should be completed on Tuesday. The bloc has said it plans to issue €80bn of debt this year.

Germany's Association of Pharmacists called on citizens to be patient and "not to storm the chemists" as those who are fully-vaccinated were able to obtain their digital vaccination pass in thousands of stores, including pharmacies, as of Monday, The Guardian reported. The website where citizens can locate a pharmacy offering the service immediately crashed. So far, 26-percent of Germans are fully-vaccinated.

Indonesia expects a new wave of coronavirus infections will peak in early July, as the highly-transmissible delta variant becomes more dominant in some areas, and with the occupancy of hospitals in Jakarta hitting 75 percent, officials said, Reuters reports. Covid-19 infections in the world's fourth-most populous country have been on the rise in recent weeks, since holidays at the end of Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month.