European Union

About 10,000 people were vaccinated against COVID-19 on the first day of mass inoculation in Montenegro on Tuesday, which is 1.5% of the population, the country’s health ministry said on Wednesday. On the second day of mass inoculation against coronavirus,...

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said on Wednesday that he was reassured, following his visit to Ljubljana, that Slovenia had not been the author of the phantom non-paper that suggested a change of borders in the Western Balkans along ethnic...

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić announced on Wednesday that people over the age of 16 would receive RSD3,000 (€25) if they got the COVID-19 vaccine. This comes after the president announced the allocation this year of €60 for all adult citizens...

The Zagreb Administrative Court has made a historic decision in the “Kožić and Šegota” case of a same-sex couple. The ruling paves the way for all lifelong partners to adopt, Daniel Martinović, who heads Croatia’s Rainbow Families association said on...

Romania’s Prime Minister Florin Cîțu announced that the Convergence Programme for 2021-2024 has been approved by the government at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday (5 May). According to media reports, however, the programme offers little that is new. It is...

Bulgarian President Rumen Radev will schedule early parliamentary elections for 11 July after parties voted into parliament following elections held just a month ago failed to form the required majority to govern. Radev also said he will appoint a caretaker...

The Slovak parliament’s deputy speaker, Juraj Šeliga (Za ľudí) stepped down from his post on Wednesday after holding a late-night meeting in a downtown club in Bratislava. Last week, Slovakian tabloid Plus 7 dní captured footage of Šeliga meeting with...

Czech Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Jan Hamáček said on Wednesday he is filing a civil complaint about an article alleging he collaborated with Russia. The article published in SeznamZpravy.cz. accused Hamáček of considering negotiating with Moscow an exchange for...

The signing of the Norway-US revised Supplementary Defence Cooperation Agreement (SDCA) on 16 April has sparked harsh criticism from Russia’s foreign ministry, accusing Oslo of “aggravating tensions in the Euro-Arctic region, and destroying Russian-Norwegian relations”. R Oslo denies claims of...

The Irish parliament has proposed legislation that would establish a new media commission. The proposed body would see staff transferred from the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) and establish an Online Safety Commissioner tasked with the regulation of social media...

Boris Johnson’s Conservatives are likely to reap the benefits of the UK’s COVID-19 vaccination programme in local elections on Thursday. The Tories are on course to win mayoral races in Birmingham and the north east of England and the prize...

A few days ahead of the EU Social Summit in Porto, Austrian Labour Minister Martin Köcher of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) rejected the idea of an EU-wide minimum wage, claiming the EU lacks competence in the area of labour...

Germany pledges to become carbon-neutral by 2045. Germany has announced plans to become carbon neutral by 2045, in a landmark shift in climate policy driven by a recent constitutional court ruling demanding better defined emissions targets after 2030. German Finance...

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has made an offer to the Danish authorities for Poland to buy back doses of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson after the product was pulled from the Danish vaccination programme due to...

Mayors and city leaders can play a double role in the green transition – as ambassadors for the European green deal locally, and as representatives of people’s concerns and interests to other levels of government, writes Dario Nardella

Eleven EU countries have signed a declaration calling on the European Union to stop funding fossil fuels under its trans-European energy infrastructure regulation (TEN-E), which is currently under revision.

Any Chinese military base in the Atlantic Ocean is unnecessary and any such hypothesis would be viewed with "strong concern", Portugal's minister of defence, João Gomes Cravinho, has said, adding that it was "not a good idea" to transform this region into a scenario of "geopolitical conflict".

Two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine have proved more than 95 percent effective against infection, hospitalisation, and death from Covid-19 in Israel, research found, The Guardian writes. One shot of the vaccine was partially effective, offering 58 percent protection against infection, 76 percent against hospitalisation, and 77 percent against death. The authors of the study in the Lancet medical journal say this shows the importance of having the second shot.

French politician and EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier described British prime minister Boris Johnson as a political "bulldozer" who shoves aside his enemies to get things done in a new book out Wednesday. He said Brexiteer Nigel Farage was "in private ... as cordial and gentle as he can be a violent demagogue in public". But he said Brexit negotiator Lord Frost was "cold" and had an "arrogant tone".

The contribution of Spain's recovery, transformation and resilience plan to the green transition is among the best in the EU, according to a report international climate experts highlighting the lack of European ambition to decarbonise the economy, EURACTIV’s partner EFE reports.