Euobserver.com

China's embassy to Belgium says there is no harassment of Uighur refugees in Europe, and no human rights abuses against Uighurs in China.

The EU would be abandoning its values if it opted for a deeper partnership with China's "dictatorship", just because it did not get along with Trump, America's ambassador to Europe has said.

A report published by the European Commission on Monday revealed that IT companies removed 70 percent of online hate speech in 2019, while assessing nearly 90 percent percent of flagged content within 24 hours. However, platforms have to improve transparency and feedback to users. "What is illegal offline remains illegal online," said commissioner for values and transparency Věra Jourová.

World Health Organization (WHO) expert Maria Van Kerkhove said on Monday that many countries that had succeeded in tackling the coronavirus are now seeing an increase in cases due to religious events and other vulnerable large settings, Reuters reported. "Any opportunity that the virus has to take hold, it will. It is really important that countries are in a position to rapidly detect these cases," she told reporters.

The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands reported on Monday zero Covid-19 deaths for the first time since early March, according to The Guardian. Additionally, the country recorded 69 new infections and two hospital admissions. The total number of deaths in the country remains at 6,090 and the total number of people infected with coronavirus has risen to 49,658.

The World Health Organization reported a record increase in global coronavirus cases on Sunday, with the total rising by 183,020 in a 24-hour period, The Guardian reports. The biggest increase was from north and south America with over 116,000 new cases. Total global cases are over 8.7 million with more than 461,000 deaths, according to the WHO.

Hungary's largest news website sounded the alarm on Sunday about its independence in a media environment squeezed by the Orban government.

A new report on the EU's progress on the United Nations' sustainable development goals reveals the bloc is struggling on both climate change and gender inequality.

Four years after the killing of an Italian activist in Cairo, Italian cities are mobilising to highlight the fate of Patrick Zaki, imprisoned since February for "inciting protest through his Facebook profile".

If the European Commission is seriously committed to its fundamental values, it is time to put words into practice and condemns unlawful returns and violence at its external borders and demands perpetrators of such illegal acts are held to account.

Spain, on Sunday, lifted quarantine rules imposed on UK nationals visiting the country. "We are discussing with UK authorities whether they will do the same on their side. Nonetheless, we are doing this out of respect for the 400,000 British that have a second residence in Spain and are dying to benefit from their homes in our country," Spanish foreign minister Arancha González told the BBC.

Serbia's ruling Progressive Party (SNS) has won a landslide victory in Europe's first national election since the coronavirus crisis began, according to projections on Sunday evening, Deutsche Welle reports. Opposition parties boycotted the poll and Covid-19 fears prompted many voters to stay home. A sample of polling stations by pollsters put president Aleksandar Vučić's SNS firmly in the lead, with 63.4% of the vote.

German authorities have expressed shock over a rampage of an "unprecedented scale" in the centre of Stuttgart, where hundreds of partygoers ran riot overnight and into Sunday, breaking shop windows, plundering and attacking police, after officers carried out checks on a 17-year-old suspected of using drugs, The Guardian reports. Two dozen people, half of them German nationals, were provisionally arrested and police reported 19 officers hurt.

The EU has risked spoiling the atmosphere ahead of Monday's China summit by calling, on Friday, for the release of a human rights lawyer jailed by China earlier last week. "We call for the immediate release of Yu Wensheng," an EU spokeswoman said, adding that his trial should have been held in the open with a proper legal defence and saying Europe "expects China ... to establish fair trial guarantees".

Food prices were the highest in Denmark (141% of the EU average) prior to the coronavirus, the European Commission has said, followed by Luxembourg, Austria, and Finland, and the lowest in Bulgaria (62%) and Poland, Hungary, and Romania. Costs of restaurants and hotels were three times higher in Denmark than in Bulgaria. Price disparities for consumer goods, such as electronics, were lower across the bloc.

In an interview with EUobserver, Chinese ambassador Cao Zhongming, talks about Hong Kong, disinformation, "unabashed bullying by the United States" on Huawei and on the role of the EU in the world.

A new report by the European Commission reveals that measures taken by online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to increase transparency in political advertising were "not sufficient".

China denies it, but Uighur exiles who fled to EU states say they are still being terrorised by threatening phone-calls, SMS-es, and other forms of "refugee-espionage".

This week, the European Union and China are holding their first joint summit since April 2019. It comes amid the pandemic, which first surfaced in China's Wuhan, protests in Hong Kong and a belligerent US president.

International burden-sharing worked in Kosovo - until the Trump administration announced White House talks with the presidents of Kosovo and Serbia on June 27, leaving the EU special envoy for the Western Balkans in the dark.