Euobserver.com

Belgium and Latvia have seized Russian assets in a "perpetual" money-laundering affair involving the killing of whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky.

Last week, the UN high commissioner for human rights said the EU and its member states are partly responsible for making the central Mediterranean more dangerous for asylum-seeker hopefuls. The EU rejects that - despite evidence suggesting otherwise.

The European Parliament's special committee on artificial intelligence and the internal market committee will discuss the commission's AI proposals with vice-president Margrethe Vestager.

At Tuesday's summit co-chaired by the EU and Sweden to discuss the most pressing issues faced by Yemen - world leaders have a real chance to pull the country back from the brink, write seven international NGOs.

The European Broadcasting Union in Geneva, which organises the Eurovision Song Contest, has suspended Belarus' state broadcaster BRTC, after Belarus forced an airplane to land to snatch an opposition journalist, and due its wider crackdown on free press. It pledged to uphold "core values of freedom of expression, independence, and accountability," announcing the move Friday. Earlier this year, it banned Belarus' Eurovision song entry for resembling pro-regime propaganda.

Russia has banned Austrian and French flights amid disarray in European skies after the Belarus hijacking.

Germany formally recognised as "genocide" the crimes committed by its colonial troops at the beginning of the 20th century against the Herero and Nama people in what is now Namibia, Deutsche Welle reports. Foreign minister Heiko Maas said in a statement that as a "gesture of recognition of the immeasurable suffering" Germany caused, it would set up a fund amounting to €1.1 billion.

A study published in the Lancet says efforts to curb the habit of smoking has been outstripped by population growth with 150 million more people smoking in the nine years from 1990, reaching an all-time high of 1.1 billion, The Guardian writes. Smoking killed almost 8 million people in 2019 and the number of smokers rose as it was picked up by young people around the world, the study says.

UK press and film industry VIPs might not be able to go to the Cannes festival in France in early July after it imposed a seven-day quarantine on British travellers from Monday to curb spread of the Indian coronavirus variant. "We're currently in a day-to-day conversation with relevant government authorities," a Cannes-festival spokesperson told The Guardian. US and many other non-EU visitors can enter France from 9 June without quarantine.

The EU and Japan have said "we support the holding of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Tokyo 2020 in a safe and secure manner this summer as a symbol of global unity in defeating Covid-19" after a video-summit Thursday, in which Europe authorised export of 100 million doses of vaccine to Japan. "We are looking forward to the Olympic Games," European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen also told press.

A team of German scientists believe they have worked out why some people given the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines develop blood clots – and claim they can tell the manufacturers how to improve the vaccine to avoid the problem, The Guardian reports. The blood clots are rare but troubling in the younger age group who are more at risk of clotting.

France bears a "terrible responsibility" for the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, president Emmanuel Macron said, in a long-anticipated speech in Rwanda's capital Kigali, The Guardian writes. Speaking at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, where 250,000 victims of the massacres are buried, Macron said that France had not been complicit in the tragedy but had made errors of judgment that had appalling consequences.

The EU had demanded Iran review the case of human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, sentenced to 30 months in prison and 80 lashes, reports the AP. It quoted an EU spokesperson as saying that Iran should consider "applicable international human rights law and taking into account her deteriorating health condition." Mohammadi, an EU Sakharov Prize winner, was sentenced for protesting against the killing of demonstrators in 2019.

The EU and Japan launched on Thursday a Green Alliance, the first such bilateral initiative between the bloc and a partner country. Under the agreement, both parties pledged to tackle climate change, promote green growth, share technologies, and ensure sustainable and secure energy supplies. Meanwhile, they also said that natural gas will play "an important role during the energy and climate transition".

Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez is considering pardoning the Catalan separatist leaders convicted over their role in the 2017 independence bid - triggering a new row between the coalition government and opposition parties.

Greek migration minister Notis Mitarachi says Athens should not be required to integrate refugees, because it is provides other services such as border protection. Instead, he says they should be free to move to other EU states.

"We simply cannot afford to make mistakes and bring cases that when they are endorsed by the council, are then annulled by the court, this would be a terrible disaster," the commission's budget chief told MEPs.

The mining industry is working hard to ensure communities in Europe (and worldwide) have no real power to reject mining projects, using the industry-coined concept of 'social licence to operate' - with as little community input and dissent as possible.

The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg issued a joint statement on Wednesday calling on the European Commission to improve the supervision of biofuels across the European market, after cross-border fraud was detected from the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK. "The biofuel supply chain is international, so supervision needs to be set up accordingly," they said. These five member states produce the majority of European biofuels.

Ireland has become the first EU country to formally designate Israeli settlement expansion as "annexation" of Palestinian land.