Euobserver.com

"We have to get in touch with authorities in Kabul, whatever they are. The Taliban have won the war so we will have to talk to them," EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said.

For 20 years, Westerners and Afghans have been trying to build a free and democratic Afghanistan. This project has failed. Let us avoid that those who believed in it pay the price.

For 20 years, Westerners and Afghans have been trying to build a free and democratic Afghanistan. This project has failed. Let us avoid that those who believed in it pay the price.

The global attraction of democracy depends on the real-life performance of democracies. The US has not been an attractive case in the last years and nor has the EU.

Poland has said it will disband a judicial disciplinary chamber to comply with an EU court order, while vowing to continue its controversial judicial reforms.

Germany has announced plans to sell up to a quarter of its stake in Lufthansa, Deutsche Welle writes. The German finance agency said the move would take place in the coming weeks and cited positive development at the airline. The state's 20 percent stake was acquired for €300m. The federal government announced the 20 percent stake initially to help the airline mitigate the effects of the global pandemic.

The death toll in northern Turkey has risen to 70 in the wake of this month's devastating floods, the country's disaster management authority (AFAD) announced on Monday, Deutsche Welle reports. Torrential rains battered the country's northwestern Black Sea provinces on 4 August, causing flash floods that demolished homes and bridges, swept away cars, and blocked roads. Officials confirmed that rescuers recovered more bodies over the weekend.

In The Netherlands tension in the labour market is high as there are more vacancies than unemployed people, the Dutch broadcaster NOS reports. "This we haven't seen in 50 years," Peter Hein van Mulligen, chief economist of the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS) said. For every 100 unemployed people, there are 106 open vacancies in the second quarter of 2021, which makes it hard for employers to find employees.

Two wildfires, fanned by strong winds, raged out of control near Athens on Monday, forcing the evacuation of villages, but there were no immediate reports of casualties, Reuters reports. More than 500 wildfires have broken out in recent weeks across Greece, which, like other countries in the Mediterranean region including Turkey and Tunisia, has seen some of its highest temperatures in decades.

Postal voting for Germany's federal election began on Monday, piling pressure on conservative chancellor candidate Armin Laschet (CDU) to reinvigorate his floundering campaign or else risk losing out to a left-leaning coalition, Reuters reports. Although polls show that the Bavarian leader, CSU politician Markus Söder, is still more popular than Laschet, Söder ruled out replacing Laschet, saying "the ballots are printed, the posters are pasted, it's been decided."

Poland's ambassador to Israel has been recalled until further notice, the foreign ministry said on Monday, in a further sign of the deteriorating relations between the countries after Warsaw introduced a law affecting World War Two property restitutions, Reuters writes. Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid on Saturday branded Poland's law "antisemitic and immoral". Lapid said the head of Israel's embassy in Warsaw was being called back immediately.

Several EU member states are worried that the Taliban takeover would trigger a replay of the 2015-16 migration crisis when the bloc has seen the arrival of over one million asylum seekers in a matter of months.

EU countries have resumed evacuations from Kabul airport, the last piece of allied-controlled territory in Afghanistan, as Taliban forces urged people to return to normal life.

The struggle for the survival of the Taliban's survival starts today. Afghanistan is a potential sink hole of instability. And we know what sinkholes do: they usually drag a much wider region down.

Of all Western-European capitals, Brussels has the lowest Covid-19 vaccination level, Belgian newspaper De Standaard writes. So far, just half of the Brussels population received at least one jab. The vaccination level in Flanders is 78 percent, in the Walloon region 67 percent. Opposition parties in the Brussels region have demanded an emergency meeting in the Brussels parliament to discuss the matter.

Gordon Brown has accused the EU of adopting a "neocolonial approach" to the supply of Covid-19 vaccines and demanded rich western nations relinquished their stranglehold on pandemic treatments, The Guardian writes. The former UK prime minister has called on Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, and Mario Draghi to convene a special summit to coincide with next month's UN general assembly in New York to address Africa's vaccine deficit.

An influx of migrants from Iraq and elsewhere into Lithuania allegedly abetted by neighbouring Belarus appears to have stopped, but leaving a pile of asylum applications to process and local communities angry about nearby camps, creating an unfamiliar challenge for the Lithuanian government, AP reports. This year, more than 4,000 asylum-seekers from 40 countries illegally crossed from Belarus into Lithuania. That was 50 times more than during all of 2020.

Canada's prime minister Justin Trudeau on Sunday announced that an early election would take place on 20 September, Deutsche Welle reports. The Canadian leader is seeking a new mandate to ensure voters approved of his government's Covid-19 pandemic recovery plan. The move comes at a "pivotal, consequential moment" for Canada amid a new wave of Covid-19 cases "amongst unvaccinated people," Trudeau said.

Thousands of people joined an LGBTI pride march in Bucharest on Saturday for the first time since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, ahead of planned legislation that would chip away at minority rights, Reuters reports. Lawmakers from two different parties said they planned to introduce legislation to ban so-called gay propaganda in schools when parliament reconvenes in September.

Italian police arrested two farmers in Sicily on Saturday on suspicion of lighting recent wildfires to create grazing land for their sheep, and said the two had been planning another large and dangerous blaze, Reuters writes. Wildfires have torn through swathes of southern Italy this summer, helped by record high temperatures, ravaging woodland in Calabria and on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia.