Euobserver.com

China has said it will not allow Hong Kong residents with British National (Overseas) status to move to Britain, following a UK offer to take in exiles fleeing China's security crackdown on the former British colony. "We firmly oppose this ... all Chinese compatriots residing in Hong Kong are Chinese nationals," China's ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, said Thursday. The British offer affects some 3 million people.

More than 77 percent of Russians voted to allow Russian president Vladimir Putin to stay in power until 2036, according to initial results published by Russia's electoral commission Wednesday. Putin, 67-years old, has already ruled Russia for 20 years. There was no independent scrutiny of the vote, which opposition leaders called a "big lie". The move puts Putin in a regional club of presidents-for-life in Belarus and Kazakhstan, among others.

West Bank annexation "was conceived almost entirely by men" and will crush the "dignity and rights" of Palestinian women still further, a group of 40 women leaders have said.

Malaysia has joined Indonesia in trying to get the EU to overturn restrictions on palm oil, said to aggravate deforestation, in a case at the World Trade Organisation in Geneva. EU plans to ban its use as a biofuel by 2030 were "discriminatory" and "unreasonable", Malaysian plantations minister Mohd Khairuddin Aman Razali said Wednesday in Kuala Lumpur, Reuters reports. Malaysia and Indonesia make 85 percent of the world's palm oil.

The European Commission says it is in talks with the US biopharmaceutical company Gilead to secure supplies of remdesivir but won't provide any details. The comments follow the purchase of the world's supply by the United States.

Austria has dampened hopes of a return by tourists to non-EU parts of the Western Balkans, saying Wednesday people returning from the region would have to self-quarantine for 14 days. "An increase [of infections] in clusters of people returning from travel in the Western Balkans," led to the move, Austrian foreign minister Alexander Schallenberg said. EU ambassadors had recently added Serbia and Montenegro to a non-binding white-list.

A Turkish state council recommendation due Thursday (2 July) on whether Hagia Sophia, a museum in Istanbul, can be turned back into a mosque, could further strain Western relations, after Greece and the US urged Turkey not to go ahead. Turkish pro-government media say first new prayers could be held on 15 July. The originally Christian, then Muslim, temple was deconsecrated in 1934 as a symbol of Turkey's then secularism.

France is temporarily suspending its involvement in a Nato naval operation off Libya's coast after a standoff with a Turkish ship and amid growing tensions within the military alliance over Libya, Reuters reports. France is also calling for a new crisis mechanism to prevent a repeat of an incident earlier this month between Turkish warships and a French naval vessel in the Mediterranean, considering it a hostile act.

The EU Commission presented on Wednesday the EU's Skills Agenda which sets quantitative objectives for up-skilling and re-skilling within the next five years. It is based on 12 actions that aim to ensure that people have the skills needed for the changing labour market in the green and digital economy. To implement the agenda, the EU will need around €48bn per year of additional public and private investments.

The fact Gerhard Schröder, a former chancellor-turned-Kremlin-lobbyist, was invited to a German parliament committee hearing on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was a "disgrace" for NGO panelist Alexander Reitzenstein, German media reported. New US sanctions on the Russia-Germany gas pipeline were a "termination of the transatlantic partnership," Schröder told MPs. It was "absurd" that the US acted as "a regulator of European [energy] issues", Niels Annen, a German official said.

Germany took over the EU's rotating presidency with chancellor Angela Merkel pushing for an agreement on the coronavirus rescue package and EU budget.

The EU's regions urged the unlocking of the potential of hydrogen produced from renewable sources, so-called 'green hydrogen', to achieve climate neutrality by 2050.

In Belgium, there are 443 statues, busts, plaques, and street names that celebrate that country's colonial past. As recently as 2005, school textbooks lauded Belgium for "civilising the black population, step-by-step."

The EU has banned Pakistan International Airlines, the national carrier, for at least six months after revelations 260 out of 860 pilots had cheated in tests but were given licences to fly anyway. Pakistan was "currently not capable to certify and oversee its operators and aircraft in accordance with applicable international standards", the EU Aviation Safety Agency said. The cheating came out in an enquiry into an air-crash in May.

Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen were responsible for 353 vanished prisoners in torture camps in the past four years, but United Arab Emirates' forces also vanished 327 people in similar facilities, according to a new report by Yemeni human rights group Mwatana. Saudi forces vanished 90 prisoners. Several hundreds of others were tortured. "The impunity with which the warring parties act is a huge problem," a Mwatana spokesman said.

The European aviation sector is starting to bleed jobs in the wake of the pandemic, with Airbus, Europe's top plane maker, to cut 15,000 posts, and Franco-Dutch group Air France-KLM to axe 7,500 positions in various EU states, the companies said Tuesday. "Airbus is facing the gravest crisis this industry has ever experienced," chief executive Guillaume Faury said. British airline EasyJet is also shedding over 2,000 jobs, it confirmed.

The EU parliament president called death threats targeting MEPs probing possible misuse of EU funds by the Czech PM "unacceptable provocations".

A new report adds weight to previous testimonies of a concerted campaign of forced sterilisation of the Uighur Muslim minority in China. Beijing denies it.

France's oldest nuclear power plant finally closed on Tuesday, one day after president Emmanuel Macron pledged to speed up the country's transition to a greener economy responding to the proposals from the French citizens' convention on climate.

Some 150 randomly-picked men and women make up Emmanuel Macron's Citizens' Climate Convention. This week Macron invited them to the Élysée Palace and promised - nearly - all of their wishes would come true .