European Union

The US is preparing to lobby world leaders in the margins of the UN general assembly in New York next week to help see that 70 percent of the world's population has been vaccinated against Covid-19 by 2022, according to a memo seen by the Reuters news agency. The document presses wealthier nations, with "relevant capabilities", to donate billions of doses as well as financing to combat "vaccine hesitancy".

The Spanish government announced on Tuesday a range of measures to reduce households energy bills, the Financial Times reported. They include fiscal measures and an effort to regain about €2.6bn from energy companies for utility "excess profits" until 2022. Prime minister Pedro Sanchez also said the tax on electricity will be reduced by €1.4bn by the end of the year. Electricity prices have reached record high of €172 per MWh.

France has got the European Commission's green light to pay out €3bn in state aid to some 100 companies in distress due to the pandemic, Reuters reports. The so-called Transition Fund will be used to pay down corporate debt and inject capital using loans and share purchases. The EU has loosened state-aid and national-debt rules in the wake of coronavirus and is also pumping billions of aid into member states.

A UN report on Tuesday revealed that the majority of the nearly €467bn annual global subsidies given to farmers are "harmful" for the climate and health, the Guardian reported. Livestock and food production, the biggest sources of emissions, receive most state funding, it found, calling for a reform to tackle the impact of agriculture in climate change. Farm subsidies represent 15 percent of total agricultural production value.

EU states' ambassadors will discuss on Wednesday how to help trade flow between the UK and Northern Ireland, which stayed in the EU customs union after Brexit, with a view to unveiling ideas by the end of the month. "Possible solutions would centre around making existing checks less laborious, limiting the amount of paperwork needed," an EU diplomat told AP. The UK had earlier asked to renegotiate the Northern-Ireland deal.

UK government officials have proposed a vaccine-booster programme aimed at health workers, those aged over 50, and people with weakened immune systems ahead of the winter, Reuters reported. UK health minister Sajid Javid also said that there is a "Plan B" to make vaccine certificates and mask-wearing mandatory in some venues. Officials said that Covid-19 vaccination has saved more than 112,000 lives and prevented 24 million infections.

Renovations have a much greater climate mitigation potential than new constructions. Discover why we must look at a building’s whole life cycle and embodied carbon if we want to align the built environment with the EU’s climate objectives.

Russian President Vladimir Putin received his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad for the first time since 2018 and criticised foreign forces that are in Syria without permission or a UN mandate - a rebuke of the United States and Turkey.

Spain’s socialist Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and Pere Aragonès, Catalonia’s pro-independence president, will open on Wednesday afternoon in Barcelona a new era of  "political dialogue" between Spain’s central government and the prosperous Spanish region. EURACTIV’s partner EFE reports.

Two Portuguese business associations – the Portuguese associations of Renewable Energies (APREN) and the Solar Photovoltaic Sector Companies (APESF) – announced their merger on Tuesday (14 September) to develop the solar photovoltaic sector in Portugal.

EU governments will spend around €150 billion of the recovery fund in social objetives, with half of this money allocated to education and health, according to European Commission’s preliminary figures.

People at risk following the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan should be given help, MEPs said in a debate on the country’s future.

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

People at risk following the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan should be given help, MEPs said in a debate on the country’s future.

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

The EU’s fiscal rule book was an early victim of the COVID pandemic, correctly, pushed aside by the need to keep businesses afloat as lockdowns derailed economies. But it has not been forgotten.

The European Commission is set to launch a new governance framework for monitoring the digital transition and new legislative tool for multi-country projects, according to a leaked copy of the draft legislation obtained by EURACTIV.

As the campaign for Germany's 26 September federal elections approaches crunch time, EURACTIV Germany took a look at what the elections could mean for key agricultural policy issues - from scrapping farmers’ direct payments to the use of new genomic techniques.

The European Commission is considering sanctions to tackle environmental damage and human rights abuses in Europe’s supply chains, according to Nils Behrndt, acting deputy director-general at the executive's justice department.

The UK government has set out plans to delay border checks on goods until January 2022, as it intensifies its attempts to push the European Commission towards renegotiating the terms of the Northern Ireland protocol.

A new delegated act proposed by the European Commission to tackle anti-microbial resistance (AMR) has drawn harsh criticisms from the Green group in the European Parliament, who are calling for the use of antibiotics in animals to be restricted.

An independent entity should investigate whether Facebook’s content moderation decisions, including automated ones, treated anti-Palestinian and anti-Israeli content differently, according to a recommendation from the social media giant’s Oversight Board. Facebook’s Oversight Board made the statement on Tuesday (14 September)...