Euobserver.com

Thousands of protestors demonstrated against the proposals in Budapest in front of the parliament this week, denouncing the Orbán government's efforts to conflate homosexuality with paedophilia.

A new report from the EU's Fundamental Rights Agency revealed the difficulties people in vulnerable situations face accessing vaccines - from language barriers, to limitations tied to residence, or legal status.

The gap between EU resources available on the one hand, and the persistence of poverty and homelessness on the other hand, is what makes these figures more than an embarrassment: it raises them to the level of a human-rights crisis.

China has, for the first time, joined Russia as an explicit danger to Western allies after a Nato summit in Brussels on Monday.

Some Western journalists, including the BBC, walked out of a press conference in Minsk Monday when Belarus authorities again paraded political prisoner Roman Protasevich, forcing him to say he had not been mistreated and to apologise for his alleged crimes. Belarus air-force chief Igor Golub also denied having forced down a Ryanair flight carrying Protasevich to Vilnius, despite multiple independent accounts confirming that one of Belarus' warplanes was involved.

The EU and US are hoping to announce the end of a 17-year long dispute on subsidies for aircraft makers Boeing and Airbus at a summit in Brussels on Tuesday, according to officials and diplomats speaking to the Financial Times newspaper. The deal, which was still being consulted with Berlin, Madrid, and Paris on Monday, involved a multi-year limit on state aid and stripping away recent punitive tariffs.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has refused to guarantee opposition leader Alexei Navalny would survive his prison term. "As far as health, all individuals who are in prison, that is something that the administration of the specific prison or penitentiary establishment is responsible for," Putin said Monday, when asked about Navalny by US broadcaster NBC ahead of a US summit and after trying to have Navalny killed with a chemical weapon.

French president Emmanuel Macron and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have agreed the mostly Syrian mercenaries there should leave Libya, in the margins of Monday's Nato summit in Brussels. "It doesn't just depend on the two of us. [But] president Erdoğan confirmed during our meeting his wish that the foreign mercenaries, the foreign militias, operating on Libyan soil leave as soon as possible," Macron told press.

The EU on Monday began selling the first bonds backing its €800bn Covid-19 recovery fund, budget commissioner Johannes Hahn said. The sale of the 10-year bond is the start of the debt-issuance between now and 2026, which will back grants and loans EU governments need to boost their recovery. The sale should be completed on Tuesday. The bloc has said it plans to issue €80bn of debt this year.

Germany's Association of Pharmacists called on citizens to be patient and "not to storm the chemists" as those who are fully-vaccinated were able to obtain their digital vaccination pass in thousands of stores, including pharmacies, as of Monday, The Guardian reported. The website where citizens can locate a pharmacy offering the service immediately crashed. So far, 26-percent of Germans are fully-vaccinated.

Indonesia expects a new wave of coronavirus infections will peak in early July, as the highly-transmissible delta variant becomes more dominant in some areas, and with the occupancy of hospitals in Jakarta hitting 75 percent, officials said, Reuters reports. Covid-19 infections in the world's fourth-most populous country have been on the rise in recent weeks, since holidays at the end of Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) director general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, on Monday called on members to drop trade restrictions for treatments against Covid-19, Reuters reported. At the beginning of the pandemic, there were 109 trade restriction (which later fell to 51 but has since raised to 53). "We need to bring those restrictions down so we can move ... medical goods and supplies and vaccines [faster]," she said.

Armin Laschet, Angela Merkel's would-be-heir after German's September election, said he would prefer to govern with the liberals - as the Greens continued their slump in the polls.

European Parliament president David Sassoli says there needs to be a European search-and-rescue system involving member states, EU agencies and civil society.

After EU member states decided to extend subsidies for some cross-border natural gas projects, green groups and some member states had pinned their hopes on MEPs to step in and improve the rules.

As president Joe Biden, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and EU Council president Charles Michel meet today, more than seven years have passed since the last opportunity for leaders from both sides of the Atlantic to engage face-to-face.

Yemen is experiencing critical days, as negotiations for a ceasefire are ongoing. Now it the time for Europe to put pressure on Iran, Yemen's foreign minister told EUobserver.

Swiss voters rejected plans to tax car fuel and flight tickets more highly in order to reduce journeys for the sake of climate change by 53.1 percent in a referendum on Sunday. Over 60 percent also voted to keep using synthetic pesticides, while almost 57 percent voted to give police more powers to monitor and interrogate anyone over 12 years old who was suspected of harbouring terrorist sympathies.

Tens of thousands of people joined protests in Madrid against controversial plans to pardon jailed Catalan separatists, the BBC reports. Leaders of Spain's right-wing parties joined the demonstration against the pardoning of 12 separatists behind a failed independence attempt in 2017. Protesters accuse the Socialist-led Spanish government of trying to shore up its political support, but the government says the pardons will help calm tensions over Catalonia.

Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya - currently living in exile in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius - has called for harsher sanctions against strongman Alexander Lukashenko's regime, adding this was the only effective way to put pressure on him and his administration, in an interview with Deutsche Welle. "Lukashenko only understands the language of force and economic sanctions ... the sanctions must be maximally tough," she said