Euobserver.com

More than 1,000 universities and science academies in Europe have urged the European Commission to let Britain quickly join its €95.5bn 'Horizon' research programme, following 10-months of Brexit-linked delays. Excluding the UK was "endangering current and future plans for collaboration" and could "result in a major weakening of our collective research", they said in an open letter. Only a "global community" could "move forward from the Covid pandemic", they said.

China's expulsion of Lithuania's ambassador from Beijing in August due to its close ties with Taiwan was a "wake-up all for Europe", Lithuania's deputy foreign Arnoldas Pranckevičius told a US security forum Thursday, Reuters reports. "China is trying to make an example out of us - a negative example, so that other countries don't necessarily follow that path," he said, while calling for US and EU solidarity on the case.

A Global Witness report on Friday found the EU body responsible for greenlighting subsidies for gas infrastructure (ENTSOG) is refusing to disclose whether there is a conflict of interest among its members. Three-quarters of ENTSOG's board members work with companies represented by the lobby group Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE), while one-third of GIE executives also sit on ENTSOG's board. GIE companies received over €4bn in EU funding since 2013.

A report on Friday found the carbon footprint of the richest one percent of the population is 30 times bigger than the level compatible with the Paris Agreement 1.5-degrees goal. They are set to account for 16 percent of global emissions by 2030. "The emissions from a single billionaire space flight would exceed the lifetime emissions of someone in the poorest billion people on Earth," said Nafkote Dabi from Oxfam.

The current gas-price crunch should not see countries return to coal-use, EU energy commissioner Kadri Simson told the COP26 climate summit in Scotland on Thursday. "The current situation on the energy markets is no reason to pause the coal exit ... On the contrary it shows the urgency to accelerate the roll out of clean energy solutions and dramatically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels," she said, Reuters reports.

After it was discovered that the Amazon no longer absorbs carbon, the Congo rainforest – soaking up some 1.2bn tonnes of carbon dioxide each year – is arguably one of our last lines of defence against climate change.

Latvian authorities have seized another property in Riga belonging to a Russian crime group behind one of the best-known money-laundering schemes in Europe.

The European region is once again the "epicentre of the pandemic," where Covid-19 cases are now at near-record levels, the regional office of the World Health Organization has warned.

Despite evidence of illegal pushbacks, Greece's migration minister Notis Mitarachi says judicial oversight already exists to ensure authorities do not abuse migrants at the border, amid claims the creation of another independent system on top could violate rule of law.

A cyberattack against one of the Nordic parliaments will be seen as an attack on them all, MPs at the annual council of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland agreed this week.

The macabre scenes, with town halls across the country using excavators to dig burial plots for recently Covid-deceased, as cemeteries and undertakers can no longer cope, has led to a surge in those wanting to vaccinate.

West-bound gas flows via the the Yamal-Europe pipeline, which brings gas from Russia via Poland, have been on hold since Saturday and have not resumed, Reuters reported on Thursday. Flows into Germany at the Mallnow metering point, which lies on the Polish border, now run in reverse, taking gas from the west to the east, data from Germany's operator Gascade also showed.

Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary have joined an international treaty against deforestation, according to an updated version of the signatories' list published by the organisers of the 'COP26' summit in Scotland Wednesday. EUobserver previously reported they had stayed out because they did not appear on the list as published immediately after the pact was signed Monday. The Croatian government, for one, vehemently denied EUobserver's report.

Czech centrist and centre-right parties reached an agreement on forming a majority coalition government and its key agenda, the chairman of the strongest party in the new coalition has said, Reuters reported. The five-party coalition faces mounting debt, an economy curbed by a global shortage of semiconductors and surging energy prices, as well as a resurgent pandemic, which has been gathering pace in recent weeks.

Arrests have been made in Belfast following disorder at a rally against the Brexit deal, which left Northern Ireland as part of the EU's customs territory, The Guardian reported. Police came under attack with missiles and fireworks close to a picket line on Wednesday evening. Two males, aged 12 and 15 years, were arrested on suspicion of riotous behaviour and released on bail as police inquiries continued.

German health minister Jens Spahn has raised alarm over rising infection rates due to people who do not want to get vaccinated. "The pandemic is far from over ... we are currently experiencing a pandemic of the unvaccinated, which is massive," he said Wednesday. "The fourth wave is developing in exactly the way we feared," Lothar Wieler, a German health chief, added. Dutch authorities also reintroduced mask-wearing on Wednesday.

EU states' soldiers Wednesday started a two-year long mission to train 11 special forces units from Mozambique's military to help the country repel Islamist insurgents in its northern Cabo Delgado province. "No country, no region and no organisation can face these global challenges alone," the EU's ambassador to Mozambique, Antonio Sanchez-Benedito Gaspar, said according to Reuters. "Our focus is to restore security," Mozambique's defence minister Jaime Neto added.

The EU wants to create a joint intervention force of some 5,000 soldiers by 2025 that can be deployed without unanimous consent for "rescue and evacuation missions or a stabilisation operation in a hostile environment", according to an internal EU document seen by Bloomberg. "Our strategic competitors should not question the EU's common resolve to respond to aggression and malicious activities against any of our member states", the document added.

Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg has called for international standards to regulate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in weapons systems. "Autonomous systems, drones and facial recognition linked into weapons systems changes completely the nature of warfare just like the industrial revolution did", he told parliamentarians in the Nordic Council in Copenhagen. "We need some systems established for weapon control and ethical warfare".

Nato has voiced alarm over "escalation" of the Belarus migration crisis after Poland accused Belarusian soldiers of crossing into its territory.