Euobserver.com

Last year was the hottest-ever in Europe and the hottest 11 out of 12 years in history fell in the past 20 years, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, an EU offshoot. Temperatures in 2019 were four degrees Celsius higher than in 2018, with record-breaking heatwaves in France and Germany, it said Wednesday. The figures come as a reminder of climate problems, as pandemic-emergent EU nations restart economies.

The EU has threatened to take action if Israel's new government annexed Palestinian land in the West Bank, Europe's foreign affairs spokesman said Wednesday. "If this proceeds, it will not be left unanswered," Peter Stano said. The EU deemed annexations were "illegal" under international law, he added. The Israeli coalition agreement foresees talks on annexation, a central election promise of right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to start on 1 July.

Pascal Lamy, the French former head of the World Trade Organisation, has urged EU leaders to dig deep to "save the European project", ahead of an EU videoconference summit on post-pandemic bailouts Thursday. "European leaders must stop fighting each other", he told Belgian daily Le Soir in an interview out Wednesday. French, Italian, and Spanish leaders have also said the EU is at risk if there is no financial solidarity.

EU steel makers could be flooded by cheap products from overseas amid a glut in world stockpiles due to the pandemic, which saw orders fall by up to 75 percent, the EU's trade commissioner, Phil Hogan, has warned. "Third country exporters may well decide to sell their product at below cost or at all cost ... with a view to gaining larger stakes in a smaller EU market," he said.

France, the Netherlands, and Spain have said they will let children go back to school in early May in staggered groups, starting with younger ones first. Dutch shops will stay closed until at least 20 May and big events, like football games, remain cancelled for another three months, Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte said Tuesday. "Impatience cropping up, [but] ... rapid relaxation can lead to the virus immediately striking again".

Russia and China are still bombarding the EU with coronavirus disinformation, including "malicious" Russian "fake cures" which put lives at risk.

It is estimated that between €275bn to €400bn will be lost for the tourism and travel sector because of the pandemic, the commissioner of the internal market, Thierry Breton, told MEPs from the parliament's committee on tourism on Tuesday.

EU candidate countries such as Albania, Montenegro and Serbia have relatively poor press freedoms - but still fare much better than Bulgaria, an EU state whose ranking in the World Press Freedom index has plummeted.

By March, the emergency had forced every government in Europe into an impossible choice - letting many people die and health systems collapse, or ground much of public life and inflict massive harm on their economic lives.

Covid-19 is no excuse to allow authoritarian minds more leeway. While Polish government uses the pandemic to conduct unfair elections, EU countries must see it as an existential political threat alongside the health and economic crisis.

Italians were hit hardest when the coronavirus landed in Europe but the European Union was slow to help the country. The president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen has apologised — twice.

Construction firms continued to suffer from a near-standstill in Belgium, were working as normal in the Netherlands, and just returned to work in Luxembourg, Besix, a Belgian company, told Reuters Tuesday, highlighting disparities in EU anti-pandemic restrictions. "There [in the Netherlands] we never had to close or slow down ... which is partially strange because it's the same business and only a few kilometres away," a Besix spokeswoman said.

European fatalities from seasonal influenza fell by half this winter, in what might have been a side-effect of anti-coronavirus lockdowns, early data from 11 EU states seen by Reuters indicated. "The flu season ended earlier than usual this year and this is probably due to the measures taken regarding [coronavirus]," Holger Rabenau, a virologist at Frankfurt University Hospital, said. Seasonal influenza killed 152,000 people in Europe in the 2017-2018 winter.

NGO BirdLife International urged the United Nations (UN) secretary-general António Guterres to declare "a healthy natural environment a fundamental human right" in an open letter on Wednesday - on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. The letter asks for this article to be included on the agenda of the UN summit on biodiversity in September 2020, with the ultimate goal of its approval in December 2023.

The European Environmental Bureau revealed on Tuesday that air pollution is returning to China after it eased lockdown restrictions, and warned the EU about a similar outcome. "Our governments and the European Commission must prevent harmful air pollution from returning and develop exit strategies which avoid taking us back to a dirty future," said EEB policy officer Margherita Tolotto. The EU committed to cut air pollution under the Green Deal.

The EU should get "new tax-raising powers" and "clamp down on tax havens", as it looks to curb economic damage wrought by coronavirus, Polish finance minister Tadeusz Kościński told the FT Tuesday ahead of an EU summit on pandemic bailouts Thursday. The EU should be "looking at tax havens, a digital tax, also a financial transactions tax, a carbon border tax: taxes that will hit other [non-EU] economies", he said.

The US was making matters worse in the global fight against coronavirus, the EU's foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said, amid geopolitical competition to exploit the crisis.

Germany might let EU institutions borrow money on the international markets using the EU budget as security chancellor Merkel has said. "I can imagine such instruments further down the line ... More generally I would like to say that Germany not only wants to act in solidarity, but that it will act in solidarity," she said. Germany and The Netherlands have previously opposed issuing joint debt to fight the slowdown.

EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell has attacked US handling of the pandemic. He said it was "weak ... and now they are seeing the consequences", but "blaming China is not the solution". The US was wrong to defund the WHO, he added. It was also unhelpful that US sanctions were stopping humanitarian supplies from getting into Iran and Venezuela, with Borrell pledging to advocate for more access.

US oil prices turned negative for the first time on record on Monday after oil producers ran out of space to store the oversupply of crude left by the coronavirus crisis, triggering an historic market collapse which left oil traders reeling, the Guardian reports. The price of US crude oil crashed from $18 a barrel to -$38 in a matter of hours on Monday but recovered to $1.10 on Tuesday.