European Union

Israel on Tuesday signed up to the EU's next Horizon science programme, worth €96bn from 2021-2027, with its foreign minister Yair Lapid saying the move "positions Israel as a central player in the largest and most important research and development programme in the world". Horizon's terms forbid Israel from spending EU money in Israeli facilities on occupied Palestinian territories, amid EU concern, repeated Monday, about ongoing Israeli settlement expansion.

"The early detections of the A (H3N2) subtype are an indication that the upcoming flu season could be severe, although we cannot know for sure," Pasi Penttinen, an expert at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said Tuesday. Elderly people, pregnant women, and those with chronic illnesses were most at risk, while health-care providers were already at breaking point due to the pandemic, the EU agency added.

A Dutch court has said the Ukrainian state should take custody of ancient gold artefacts from Russia-occupied Crimea, instead of four museums on the annexed peninsula, who tried get them back from the Netherlands' Allard Pierson Museum, where they were loaned in 2014. "After the 'Scythian gold', we'll return Crimea," Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky said. Russia did not comment. Tuesday's decision can still be appealed at the Dutch Supreme Court.

Some 73 percent of Poles said Warsaw should back down in its rule-of-law dispute with Brussels in a survey by IBRiS for the Rzeczpospolita newspaper Tuesday, even as Russian media had a field day with Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki's recent anti-EU interview in the Financial Times. The Izvestia and Lenta newspapers said he had warned of "a Third World War over the EU", while RT praised Morawiecki's "great words".

Police have formed a special task force that will investigate death threats to Slovenia’s top officials and MPs after letters with bullets in them were mailed to several top politicians this week. The police said the task force took over...

Environment ministers and representatives sought - and failed to find - common ground, following the gridlocked summit of EU leaders, on solutions to rising energy prices.

Sweden's centre-right MEP Tomas Tobe is steering the core bill on migration and asylum through the European Parliament. But his draft proposal has been met with resistance from liberal left leaning MEPs, possibly creating another political deadlock.

The commission vice-president Vera Jourova highlighted Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and France - where developments in the media market have caused concern, and admitted the "state of the media in EU is not good".

EU institutions and states abdicated their responsibilities for search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean, deputising Libya to take their place, withdrawing naval assets from high-seas corridors, and obstructing, even criminalising, NGO groups, writes the European director of Human Rights Watch.

A commitment to fighting racism cannot go hand in hand with 'Fortress Europe' policies which demonise black, brown and Muslim refugees and migrants or with rights violations linked to Frontex pushbacks.

An informal meeting of the heads of the national SIRENE bureaus, responsible for the operation of national segments of the Schengen Information System (SIS), is taking place in Slovenia on Tuesday and Wednesday. Particular emphasis will be put on the...

Romanian state-run natural gas producer Romgaz says it has reached an agreement with ExxonMobil to buy its share in an offshore perimeter in the Black Sea, where significant gas discoveries have been made. ExxonMobil and OMV Petrom have jointly operated...

The EU has utilised portfolio standards to cut vehicle fleet emissions, and climate policy advisors are now pushing similar strategies for emissions reduction in buildings, via 'green' mortgages to finance deep renovations.

The term “sex” in the Constitution should be understood only in its biological sense, according to the long-awaited interpretative decision of the Bulgarian Constitutional Court (CC), which was called upon to resolve the issue of the concept of terms “sex”...

Washington has sent a special envoy to Bosnia and Herzegovina to help with a long-delayed electoral and constitutional reform in the Balkan country, against the backdrop of heightened tensions among its Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs.

Conspiracy theories about COVID-19 are popular in Slovakia and are significantly affecting the vaccination rate in the country, which is the third-lowest in the EU after Bulgaria and Romania, a recent poll carried out by the Slovak Academy of Sciences...

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán welcomed French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen in the Hungarian capital on Tuesday and thanked France’s far-right candidate for standing by Hungary during the repeated “attempts to crucify us several times in the last...

Four new ministers joined Mateusz Morawiecki’s government on Tuesday, while a fifth minister changed portfolios. Henryk Kowalczyk is now vice-prime minister and minister responsible for agriculture. He is the former climate minister and his task is now to “improve the...

US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the United States is considering adding four countries to its visa waiver program that allows citizens to come to America without a visa for a stay of up to 90 days.

The government wants to continue the budget negotiations with the left and asked for a spirit of compromise, Prime Minister António Costa said on Tuesday. Nothing justifies putting an end to the governing coalition that took office in 2016, he...