Euobserver.com

Dozens of countries are facing severe oxygen shortages because of surging Covid-19 cases, threatening the "total collapse" of health systems, The Guardian reports. Nineteen countries around the world – including India, Argentina, Iran, Nepal, the Philippines, Malaysia, Pakistan, Costa Rica, Ecuador and South Africa – are deemed most at risk after recording huge increases in demand since March while having vaccinated less than 20 percent of their populations.

Photographs have emerged of the bodies of babies and toddlers washed up on a beach in Libya, highlighting the human tragedy of the migration crisis on Europe's borders, The Guardian reports. According to one of the charities that posted the photos on Twitter, the children had been travelling with their parents on one of the many small boats that left from Libya in recent days.

The father of the Belarusian journalist Raman Pratasevich, seized from a diverted Ryanair flight, said it was clear his son was acting under duress and had been beaten when he recorded a video "confessing" to organising mass protests against the regime, The Guardian writes. Dmitry Pratasevich said "it's clear that he was physically harmed because you can see signs of a beating on his face."

EU leaders's climate-neutrality discussions showed there are divisions on how to implement the 2050 goal.

Only 46 percent of respondents from minority groups said they were respected when police stopped them, the EU report found. It was published on the first anniversary of George Floyd's death.

Last month, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Dutch Parliament had an online call with Russian dissident Alexi Navalny's chief of staff. Or so the parliamentarians thought. It turned out that they may have been talking to a deepfake.

Trust in government bodies tends to be higher in the Germanic cultural region than in the Latin one. Differences in basic values, and emotional and behavioural differences, have been causing problems for the EU since it was established in 1952.

EU leaders on Tuesday committed to donating at least 100 million doses to low and middle-income countries by the end 2021 and to help develop local manufacturing capacity. This was first announced by European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, during last week's global health summit in Rome.

The night train between Brussels and Vienna will start running again on Tuesday after a six-month break due to travel restrictions being imposed to fight the coronavirus crisis in both countries, the Brussels Times reports. The train, run by Austrian railway authority ÖBB, will depart from Vienna onTuesday and will arrive in Belgium's capital on Wednesday morning.

Poland has refused to honour an EU court injunction, issued Friday, to shut a "brown coal" mine in the town of Turow suspected of harming Czech groundwater. "We will not ... counteract with all our strength this wrongful, unfair and unexpected decision," Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki said. The move would cost "tens of thousands of jobs" and could cause domestic power cuts Polish development minister Jarosław Gowin added.

Health authorities on Monday said India's total death toll has reached 303,720 - after adding 50,000 deaths in just under two weeks, Deutsche Welle writes. India is the third, after US and Brazil, to hit the grim landmark of 300,000 deaths. Experts believe the actual death toll to be almost two to three times higher, as the virus continues to spread in rural areas where record-keeping is difficult.

A Russian regulator has given Google one day to delete banned content or face punitive measures, Deutsche Welle writes. The regulator said Google had not fulfilled its obligation to exclude search results with links to "internet resources with information prohibited in our country." Among them, it said, were "sites of terrorist and extremist organisations, sites with pornographic images of minors, and also online stores selling drugs."

The EU slammed the "kidnapping" of Mali interim president Bah N'Daw and prime minister Moctar Ouane after soldiers took the civilian leaders into custody, Deutsche Welle reports. The leaders were reportedly taken to the Kati military base located near Mali's capital, Bamako. "What happened was grave and serious and we are ready to consider necessary measures," European Council president Charles Michel told reporters following an EU summit in Brussels.

EU leaders have closed Belarus to international flights and banned its airlines after the regime there hijacked a passenger lane on Sunday.

Most arms deals include "post-sale services", such as training, maintenance and know-how. Often up to 50 percent of the value of a multi-year arms contract is related to post-sale services, which leave companies with an unseen stake in controversial conflicts.

Re-opening to travellers safely stands as the main challenge to relaunch the tourism sector, which in pre-pandemic times accounted for 13 percent of Italy's GDP.

The Conference on the Future of Europe can become a milestone in EU climate policy making – if its recommendations are specific and address the deadlocked issues.

Belgian authorities evacuated people and held up rail traffic in the Brussels North station for an hour and half on Sunday amid reported sightings of Jürgen Conings, a soldier and far-right extremist who has been on the run after four days after stealing heavy weapons and leaving a sinister note. "The army and the security services are mobilised to ensure the safety of everyone," a Belgian prosecutor said.

A gun-toting Greek billionaire is making a mockery of EU sanctions on Russia, but no one in Athens or Brussels seems to care, posing the question: Is the EU regime a paper tiger?

The killing, earlier this month, of an Ethiopian journalist, Sisay Fida, "must be thoroughly investigated" and the expulsion of a New York Times journalist, Simon Marks, was "a matter of serious concern," the EU foreign service said Saturday. The EU is seriously concerned about the shrinking space for freedom of the media and harassment, arrests as well as restrictions imposed on Ethiopian and international journalists in Ethiopia," it added.