European Union

The post-2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform agreement struck in June introduced a new concept of social dimension that bears the potential to build a third "pillar" for the EU's farming subsidy programme in the near future.

France, Britain and Germany are working on a United Nations proposal aimed at establishing a safe zone in Kabul to allow safe passage for people trying to leave Afghanistan, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Sunday (29 August).

Social Democrat Olaf Scholz won a televised debate on Sunday between the three leading candidates to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor after Germany's federal election on 26 September, a survey by pollster Forsa showed, Reuters writes. The snap poll showed 36 percent of voters believed Scholz won, ahead of 30 percent for Greens candidate Annalena Baerbock and 25 percent for Armin Laschet, the candidate of Merkel's centre-right CDU/CSU.

France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are working on a United Nations proposal aimed at establishing a safe zone in Kabul to allow passage for people trying to leave Afghanistan, French president Emmanuel Macron said, Reuters reports. Macron, who said France had begun discussions with the Taliban on further evacuations, said the resolution would be brought on Monday to an emergency UN Security Council meeting of veto-wielding members.

Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz met Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in the West Bank on Sunday (29 August) for the first official Israeli-Palestinian talks since Prime Minister Naftali Bennett took office in June.

The Italian coastguard picked up 539 people from a fishing boat drifting near the small Mediterranean island of Lampedusa on Sunday in one of the largest single rescue operations on record, the BBC reports. The asylum seekers, who had come rom Libya, included women and children, and many of them showed signs of having been physically abused prior to embarking, according to charity MSF (Doctors Without Borders).

UK carrier British Airways is to launch a low-cost airline in Europe by the summer of 2022 to compete with rivals Easyjet and Ryanair, according to a leaked internal memo, CNN reports. The firm confirmed it was working "on proposals for a short-haul operation at Gatwick", but declined to comment further. It made a loss of €2.3bn last year, but expects the short-haul market to quickly recover after the pandemic.

EU banks have done little to adapt to new environmental, social, and governance-related (ESG) risks, according to US asset-management firm BlackRock in a report tasked by the European Commission, Reuters reports. Implementation of new ESG measures "needs to be accelerated", it said. Awareness of ESG risks in lending policy and stress testing was sometimes "superficially" applied, "limited ... in scope", and "at an early stage", it added.

The messy US pull-out from Afghanistan has shown Europe must build up its own army, EU internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, a close ally of French president Emmanuel Macron, has said. Europe needed "a military projection force" capable of "intervening militarily outside our border", he wrote in a blog on Friday, adding: "Europe has always exercised its global influence through its soft power ... this is no longer sufficient".

The former leader of Austria's far-right FPÖ party, Heinz-Christian Strache, was found guilty of corruption by a regional court in Vienna on Saturday and given a suspended 15-month jail sentence. The court said he changed a law to help a friend secure public-health contracts back when he was part of a ruling coalition which collapsed in 2019, but Strache denies wrongdoing and can appeal the verdict in a higher tribunal.

German police detained over 100 people and four officers were injured at an anti-coronavirus rules rally in Berlin Saturday, in which thousands marched through the city centre and some tried to storm barricades near parliament, Reuters reports. Most candidates for federal elections September have promised no new lockdown despite a fourth wave of infections. But some regions, such as Baden-Wuerttemberg, are tightening restrictions on unvaccinated people's access to public places.

US travellers coming to the EU face higher chances of being asked to quarantine upon arrival due to an increase in coronavirus infections in America.

To reject any humanitarian, military intervention is not only problematic from an ethical point of view. It also shows a lack of long-term thinking about European self-interest.

The EU has started paying Italy billions in pandemic aid. It is Europe's biggest beneficiary and could see a major GDP bump, but only if the money is well spent.

With its new special envoy at the helm, the EU can play a significant role in effectively moving us towards a world where our diversity of beliefs is valued and respected by all.

Indoor environmental quality has major impact on our health and wellbeing. The EPBD revision will boost building energy renovation at a massive scale. We show why and how the EPBD should better tackle IEQ and how REHVA promotes healthy buildings.

Japan has not registered for the moment any health problems in patients inoculated with the Moderna vaccine related to the contamination detected in a batch of doses from Spain, according to sources from the county’s health ministry quoted on Friday (27 August) by EURACTIV’s partner EFE.

Only four weeks ahead of the German election, the three lead candidates met on Sunday (30 August) to debate the future of Europe’s biggest economy. While the most contested issue was climate policy, there was one topic in the debate that was almost missing completely from the agenda: the European Union.

As it loses steam in the polls, Poland's right-wing populist government is playing the anti-immigration card that helped it win in 2015, hoping to take back the political initiative, analysts said.

British ministers will consider easing post-Brexit immigration rules to help end a shortage of truck drivers amid mounting pressure from supermarket chains, The Times newspaper reported.