Euobserver.com

The European Commission unveiled on Tuesday its first-ever strategy to tackle antisemitism and promote Holocaust remembrance. Under the proposal, the EU executive aims to create a Europe-wide network of experts and industry representatives who can remove illegal online hate speech. The EU will also provide funding to better protect certain places of worship and religious gatherings, and to develop a European research hub on contemporary antisemitism and Jewish culture.

Centre-left candidates are set to win Italy's big cities in local elections, partial results showed on Monday, with Rome's incumbent mayor Virginia Raggi of the 5-Star Movement headed for defeat, Reuters writes. The results are not expected to have immediate repercussions for the stability of prime minister Mario Draghi's national-unity government, analysts said.

Facebook blamed a "faulty configuration change" for a nearly six-hour outage on Monday that prevented the company's 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, Reuters writes. Several Facebook employees who declined to be named had told Reuters that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems.

France is keen for Europe's military to play a greater role alongside the US in the Indo-Pacific, an aide to French president Emmanuel Macron said Monday, after a US-French rift over an Australian defence deal. "There really is an opportunity," the advisor said, Reuters reports. "We don't want to push Europeans into making a sort of binary choice between partnership with the US or Europe turning inward," he added. to

Israel has accused Iran of sending an assassin to kill Israelis in Cyprus in allegations denounced as "baseless" by Tehran. "An act of terror ... was orchestrated by Iran against Israeli businesspeople", the Israeli prime minister's office said Monday, after Cypriot police arrested a 38-year old Azeri man with a Russian passport, who came to Nicosia from Turkish-controlled Cyprus and who reportedly had a gun and silencer in his car.

The European Medicines Agency on Monday said an extra dose of BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna may be given to people with severely weakened immune systems, at least 28 days after their second dose. It also said healthy adults can get an extra BioNTech/Pfizer jab six months after the second dose, noting risks to inflammatory heart conditions or other very rare side effects remained unknown.

Some 20 organisations launched a European citizen's initiative to demand an EU ban on fossil fuel adverts. The campaign was launched as 80 Greenpeace activists blocked the entrance to Shell's oil refinery in the Dutch port of Rotterdam. "We're asking the public to make their voices heard and demand an EU ban on fossil fuel ads," said Greenpeace EU climate and energy campaigner Silvia Pastorelli in a statement.

Two MEPs have called for tighter regulation of tech firms after a Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, who is to testify in senate Tuesday, leaked papers showing it abused users' data. Haugen showed we must "not let large tech companies regulate themselves," Danish centre-left MEP Christel Schaldemose, who is rapporteur on the EU's new digital services law, said. "We need to regulate the whole system," German Green MEP Alexandra Geese added.

Catalonia's former separatist leader Carles Puigdemont has walked out of a Sardinian courthouse after a judge delayed a decision on Spain's extradition request and said he was free to travel, The Guardian writes. His Italian lawyer, Agostinangelo Marras, told reporters a ruling on his extradition to Spain, where he is accused of sedition, is waiting on decisions by a high court in Europe regarding Puigdemont's immunity.

Romanian MEP Dacian Cioloş officially resigned at a Renew group meeting on Monday in Strasbourg.

The EU plans to sweeten its tone on enlargement at this week's Western Balkan summit, while voicing caution on Europe's readiness to take in extra members.

Deputy foreign minister Piotr Wawrzyk said migrants kids are "not driven off into the forest but to the border zone", in what appeared to be an admission of illegal pushbacks.

The EU's 2030 Forest Strategy is triggering diplomatic clashes over who should responsible for forest policy, as EU auditors voice concern on biodiversity loss.

Dutch finance minister Wopke Hoekstra should excuse himself from an EU decision on tax-havens after he was named in the 'Pandora Papers' revelations, a leading MEP has said.

Labor leader Jonas Gahr Støre will have to form a minority government after the coalition which once ruled Norway for eight years could not agree on oil and gas.

Nearly 30 years after the fall of communism, Ukraine is struggling to build a free press, due to corrupt oligarchs and Russia.

Former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing fondled the thighs of former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt under the table at an official dinner at the French embassy in Copenhagen some 20 years ago, she said in a book out Monday. He was in his 70s and president of the European Convention, a body drafting an EU constitution, at the time, while she was an MEP. He denies having done it.

Romanian MEP Dacian Cioloş announced on Friday that he will step down as chair of the liberal Renew Europe group in the European Parliament, if a party congress would confirm his victory in a national party leadership contest. "I will step down as president of Renew Europe. I'll go inform my colleagues next week," Cioloș said to the Romanian press. It is not clear yet if this confirmation took place.

BepiColombo, a probe launched by the European Space Agency, an intergovernmental body of 22 European countries, has sent back its first photographs of Mercury from 200km above the planet's surface. The spacecraft, which has been travelling since 2018, will do five more fly-bys, taking ever-better pictures with high-resolution cameras, before entering into orbit around Mercury permanently in 2025.

Countries with low vaccination-rates will see "a significant surge in [Covid] cases, hospitalisations, and mortality for the upcoming two months ... due to very high virus circulation," the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, an EU agency in Sweden, has said. Even the vaccinated risked infection and "severe outcomes", it added. Just 61 percent of all EU nationals have been vaccinated, with lower rates in eastern and southern Europe.