Euobserver.com

Two more Polish regions have ditched former declarations saying they were "LGBTI ideology-free zones" under threat of losing EU funds. The votes by the Małopolskie and Podkarpacie districts came after the Świętokrzyskie region also made a U-turn last week. Podkarpacie said Monday it was a place of "long-standing toleration". But the Lubelski region voted to keep its anti-gay declaration. "We don't kneel for Brussels, only before God," it said Monday.

Hungary has told Ukraine to stay out of its gas contracts, after Budapest made a 15-year deal to take more volumes via Russia's new Turkey pipeline, called Turkstream, which bypasses Ukraine. "Energy safety is a matter of [national] security," Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó said. The Russian deal was a "purely political, economically unreasonable decision", Ukraine's foreign ministry said. Russia recently completed another pipeline, Nord Stream 2, also bypassing Ukraine.

The two main rivals both have said they will try to head the next government. But the splintered election result means either will need both the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats to form a majority.

ECB president Christine Lagarde said that "fiscal authorities" (ie governments) have a responsibility to "harness market power" to arrange better prices and referred to a Spanish plan that might "rebalance other market forces."

MEPs have slammed the European Commission for sidelining the European Parliament in the new Health Emergency preparedness and Response Authority (HERA), giving MEPs a role of mere observers. Its budget will be €6bn over the next six years.

Economist Shahin Vallée says Germany has the resposability to lead the European debate on fiscal reforms in the face of the climate crisis. If they don't take up the mantle, the EU will continue failing during further crises.

Right-wing extremist narratives thrive on the US's swift withdrawal from Afghanistan. They may gain traction particularly among soldiers and veterans of Western armed forces, some of which have in the past been confronted with right-wing radicalisation among their troops.

In this first EU Scream Book Club, co-authors of The Last Bluff recount how the world watched in awe — and often admiration — as a scrappy government in Athens tried to stare down Europe's financial and political establishment.

The next step is scaling up the prototype platforms so that tidal energy can become commercially viable and enter the energy grid in a meaningful way. There's just one hitch in this plan: cost

The European micro-state of San Marino voted to legalise abortions in a referendum Sunday in which 73 percent of people wanted to go ahead. "It's unacceptable to view as criminals women who are forced to have abortions," Francesca Nicolini, a doctor with the NGO the San Marino Women's Union, which initiated the plebiscite, said in the run-up. Abortions have been legal in neighbouring and also Roman Catholic Italy since 1978.

Iceland has elected some 30 women out of 63 MPs in parliament - a figure representing 47.6 percent, falling just short of a historic 50 percent-margin, which has never been attained by any European country. Sweden had previously come closest on 47 percent. Rwanda (61.3 percent), Cuba (53.4 percent), and Nicaragua (50.6 percent) currently top international tables. The UK has 34.2 percent and the US just 27.6 percent female MPs.

Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte has sacked his economy minister, Mona Keijzer, after she criticised his vaccine-pass policy in a newspaper interview. She had to go "with immediate effect" for being in "direct conflict with decisions made only recently in the council", he said Saturday. "It becomes increasingly difficult to explain why you have to show a proof of vaccination in one place, but not the other," Keijzer had said.

Afghanistan's envoy to Greece, Mirwais Samadi, has urged EU states to be more welcoming to refugees. "In normal circumstances I would not be in favour of illegal movement but when people are forced to leave due to the security situation ... what should we do?," he told The Guardian. Other ambassadors, like him, from the government-in-exile, still held Zoom meetings, but were "in limbo", he added, following the Taliban's takeover.

Russia was ready to pump more gas to ease a market-crunch which saw European prices jump 250 percent since late 2020, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Sunday. "Is it possible to get more gas from state-owned firm] Gazprom and pump it in there? It's possible. Gazprom is ready", he said, Interfax reports. Gazprom was "interested" in new contracts "because our consumers in Europe are our main partners," Peskov added.

US-EU efforts to regulate the global tech industry were "not about any specific third country", such as China, EU commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said ahead of a Trade and Technology Council in Pittsburgh this week. But there was "real strategic and geopolitical importance to this new platform ", he noted Sunday. "Friends can easily from time to time make mistakes," he added, on a recent US-Australia defence deal that angered France.

Some 64 percent of Swiss people voted to legalise same-sex marriage in a referendum on Sunday. "Whoever loves each other and wants to get married will be able to do so [from July 2022], regardless of whether it is two men, two women," justice minister Karin Keller-Sutter said. "This was not about love and feelings. It was about children's welfare," Monika Rueegger, from the right-wing Swiss People's Party, also said.

EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen will travel to the Western Balkans - ahead of an EU summit with the six countries which are hoping to join the bloc.

The centre-left and centre-right candidates to replace Angela Merkel as German chancellor have both claimed the right to go ahead after inconclusive election results.

The Dutch environmental agency has published a report showing the country's climate strategy is not in accordance with the EU 'Fit for 55' package. The government must cut an additional 15 megatonnes of CO2. While the Dutch green industrial strategy is targeted at carbon-capture storage and blue hydrogen, which is derived from gas, the EU prescribes mandatory use of electricity generated from green hydrogen and general reduction goals for industry.

A new report revealed that oil and gas firms are planning to ramp up their fossil fuel extraction in the Arctic by more than 20 per cent over the next five years, partly thanks to the financial support from banks.