Euobserver.com

Guillaume Peltier, a senior centre-right French MP had defected from the Les Republicans party to the camp of far-right presidential contender Eric Zemmour, as France prepares for upcoming elections. Peltier was, until last year, the number two-man in Les Republicains, but he said its candidate, Valérie Pécresse, was ideologically too close to president Emmanuel Macron, while Zemmour was "the only candidate capable of galvanising the right and beating Macron".

Tech firms will face EU laws on combating online child sex-abuse, instead of current voluntary schemes, EU home-affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson has said. "I will propose legislation in the coming months that will require companies to detect, report, and remove child sexual abuse," she said in Germany's Welt am Sonntag newspaper Sunday. Tech firms reported 22m related offences in 2020, but this was the tip of an iceberg, she said.

Former Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz has been made co-chairman of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR), an NGO including other former leaders such as Britain's Tony Blair. The ECTR is meant to fight racism and antisemitism, even though Kurz, while in power, ruled in league with Austria's far right. Kurz, last year, also joined Thiel Capital, a US firm which backed former far-right US president Donald Trump.

Kazakhstan president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev fired two more senior security officials on Sunday in an ongoing crackdown following days of violent unrest. Tokayev earlier ordered his forces to shoot-to-kill protesters without warning. Russian and Kazakh state media said 164 people have been killed, citing a Kazakh social-media post, but the post was later deleted amid patchy information and internet coverage in the crisis.

Russia and the US have begun "complex" talks on European security, as the West dampened expectations for a positive outcome.

The EU's flagship naval operation risks losing permission to pursue pirates in Somalia's waters due to local politics.

A lieutenant colonel with top-level Kremlin links, a spy-catcher, and a Big Data specialist - the identities of eight Russians recently expelled by Nato shed light on the espionage threat in Brussels.

While the EU is turning the Conference on the Future of Europe into another round in the outdated debate between eurofederalists and eurosceptics, President Biden has diplomatically endorsed the emergence of the Union as a democratic polity in international law.

Nearly 600,000 Macedonians moved abroad in the decades following the country's independence. In neighbouring Albania,1.7 million people, 37 percent of the population, have left the country in the last three decades.

The leader of Poland's ruling conservative party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, admitted in an interview that the country had bought the controversial Pegasus spyware. However, he denied that it had been used against political opponents, AP reported on Friday. "It would be bad if the Polish services did not have this type of tool," Kaczynski said. The comments follow reports revealing that the phones of Polish opposition figures were hacked several times.

The cliché of the big bad wolf continues into the present day. In places like Finland deeply-entrenched cultural anxieties fuel unfounded fears that they will attack innocent children on their way to school.

A leading MEP has proposed revenues from the forthcoming EU carbon border tax should be used to support the decarbonisation of least-developed countries, as well as the phase-out of free allowances by end of 2028.

The EU's top diplomat warned Russia against military intervention in its neighbouring Kazakhstan, where protestors have been calling for a change in government.

France's data privacy watchdog has fined Google and Facebook a total of €210m for making it difficult for users to reject cookies, the Guardian reports. Google was fined €150m and Facebook €60m. "Rejecting cookies should be as easy as accepting them" said Karin Kiefer of the agency. But on Facebook "several clicks are required to refuse all cookies, as opposed to a single one to accept them."

The UK has added its voice to warnings from Washington and the EU that Russia will face "high-impact" sanctions if Vladimir Putin decides on another military invasion of Ukraine, the Guardian reports. British foreign secretary Liz Truss told MPs on Thursday that the response would hit Russia's abilities to carry out international financial transactions. Truss said: "The UK is working with our partners on these sanctions."

Swedish environmental activist Geta Thunberg has attacked the growing practice of airlines flying empty or near empty flights during the Covid pandemic to keep their airport slots, AP reports. "The EU surely is in a climate emergency mode," Thunberg tweeted sarcastically this week, following a story about Brussels Airlines making some 3,000 unnecessary flights. Lufthansa may fly an additional 18,000 "unnecessary" flights through the winter to keep landing slots.

Some 200 military personnel, including 40 army doctors, have been drafted in to London hospitals to help with the Omicron Covid surge, the Guardian reports. The extra support follows huge hospital staff absences due to the disease. The other 160 personnel, who have no medical training, will check in patients, ensure stocks are maintained and would also be "conducting basic checks", the Ministry of Defence said.

A Russia-led military alliance said on Thursday that it will send peacekeeping forces to Kazakhstan after violent protests led to the resignation of the government earlier this week, AP reported. Kazakh president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev had asked allies for help in controlling the unrest, including the seizure and setting alight of public buildings. Demonstrations were sparked by a rise in fuel prices in the central Asian nation.

New daily infections, fulled by the spread of the Omicron variant, are breaking records in Europe, prompting several member states to consider further unpopular restrictions.

Serbian president Alexsandar Vučić has complained that Austrialia "maltreated" world number one tennis star Novak Djokovic, after his dramatic visa refusal at an Australian airport on Wednesday. Serbian star Djokovic was attempting to enter the country to compete in this month's Australian Open, with a "medical exemption" rather than a vaccination declaration. Vučić said: "I told our Novak that the whole of Serbia is with him."