European Union

The United States is tracking enough indicators and warnings surrounding Russian military activity near Ukraine to trigger "a lot of concern" and Russian rhetoric appears increasingly strident, the top US military officer said late on Thursday (2 December).

If the EU wants to become an important geopolitical actor, it needs to play a role not only in Africa but in its Eastern neighbourhood, Lithuania’s deputy defence minister, Margiris Abukevičius, told EURACTIV at the sidelines of the NATO ministerial...

The EU has blacklisted travel firms and Belarusian officials who helped create the migrant crisis with Poland.

Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabić said on Thursday that she was generally satisfied with the European Commission’s report about Serbia’s progress in the process of association with the EU, and that the government would “focus on the recommendations” in the...

The government-sponsored amendments to the bill on infection diseases that envisage fines for persons not complying with the COVID-19 certificate mandate “are not a law but an act of terrorising,” President Zoran Milanović said on Thursday. Commenting on increasingly frequent...

Home affairs officials from the EU and the Western Balkans meeting at Brdo estate on Thursday agreed on the need to improve the exchange of information and cooperation on the ground in the combat against organised crime, and terrorism and...

There are “high suspicions” that two of the Romanian citizens returned this week from South Africa are infected with the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, the health ministry said Thursday. On Tuesday, Romania repatriated a few dozen citizens from South Africa...

Austrian former chancellor Sebastian Kurz, leader of the centre-right People's party (ÖVP) since 2017, suddenly announced on Thursday that he was quitting politics., The Guardian reported. Kurz became chancellor in 2017, but recently stepped down after being placed under investigation on allegations of corruption. Kurz said he was leaving politics to focus on his family since he recently became a father.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention said on Thursday the Omicron variant is expected to be detected in over half of all cases of Covid-19 in Europe within the next few months, Reuters reported. It is estimated that Omicron is likely to be more contagious than the current Delta variant. However, experts in the EU and abroad are still assessing Omicron's transmissibility and how effective vaccines are against it.

The German government decided on Thursday to bar non-vaccinated people from entering business other than essential grocery stores and pharmacies, Reuters reported. "We have understood that the situation is very serious and that we want to take further measures in addition to those already taken," chancellor Angela Merkel told a news conference. Legislation to make vaccination mandatory is expected to be adopted early next year, taking effect from February.

Asylum seekers have been sleeping in the streets, some for weeks, in the Belgian capital Brussels - as the government grapples over the lack of capacity to accommodate them despite months of debate over the issue.

Bulgaria has not given up on its historical claims to North Macedonia, which continue to be a condition for lifting its veto on Skopje. In talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Thursday, Bulgarian President...

MEPs failed to convince member states to set concrete and legally-binding deadlines for phasing out fossil-fuel subsidies and other environmentally-harmful subsidies .

EU energy ministers met on Thursday to debate spiking gas and electricity prices, and clashed over market reform - with some countries, led by Germany, opposing actions put forward by France and others.

A court ruling next year, in line with the opinion, would clear the way for the EU Commission to launch the mechanism against Poland and Hungary.

When hospitals are full with COVID-19 patients, it will be up to the scoring system to decide who gets the intensive care unit or artificial lung ventilation, the health ministry has announced. In recent weeks, many doctors have been talking...

Objectively speaking, German politicians have earned a good report card for their management of the corona pandemic so far. Why then is there so much anger about the national coronavirus response?

Speaking at the Global Progressive Forum, former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta describes the victim-shaming of Italy and Spain during the financial crisis - and explains how a big bag of money from Brussels may be helping heal the wounds.

Hungary wants to block joint bloc participation after being the only EU country not invited to US President Joe Biden’s democracy summit next week. It says Washington has bigger problems with democracy than Budapest, Telex reported. At a meeting of EU ambassadors on...

The future Czech government wants to speed up the country’s energy transition and phase out coal earlier. “It would be the best success to do it (coal phase-out) by 2030, 2033 at the latest,” environment minister candidate Anna Hubáčkova (KDU-ČSL,...