Euobserver.com

Chancellor Angela Merkel said if German regions do not impose stricter measures, she would have to think about overriding state regulations "in the very foreseeable future". A sensitive post-war issue in the federal republic.

A report published on Monday revealed how Covid-19 pushed coal power to a record fall of four percent last year. The largest coal-generating countries after China - India, the US, Japan and South Korea - all saw usage decline. However, the estimated annual decrease in coal power to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 must be around 14 percent. Wind and solar supply almost a tenth of global electricity.

Greek migration minister Notis Mitarachi suggested people smugglers are feeding media "fake news" on illegal pushbacks because they are losing cash flow.

The nuclear energy industry trade association FORATOM on Monday called on the European Commission to include nuclear energy under the sustainable finance taxonomy and ecolabel for retail financial products, after the publication of a leaked report from the Joint Research Centre. This scientific body concluded that nuclear does not cause more harm to human health nor the environment than any other power-producing technologies considered sustainable under the taxonomy.

EU Council and European Commission president Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen are going to Turkey next week to meet president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The trip comes after EU leaders offered Turkey more money to take care of refugees and to restart talks on better customs perks, in return for Turkey continuing its freeze on gas-drilling in Cypriot and Greek-claimed waters. Leaders also threatened sanctions if the drilling resumed.

MEPs have been urged to find an alternatives to one-use disposable masks now obligatory in all European Parliament premises.

In the eyes of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, there are grounds to believe that war crimes were committed by the Israel Defense Forces in occupied Palestine.

The huge container ship, MV Ever Given, has reportedly been refloated from the banks of the Suez canal, raising hopes that the vital waterway will soon reopen and that global shipping backlogs will be cleared, The Guardian reports. At least 369 vessels are waiting to transit the canal, including dozens of container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) or liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) vessels.

"We expect an amount of about €4bn in July and August" from the EU's pandemic recovery fund, Greek deputy finance minister Theodore Skylakakis said on TV Saturday. Over half is to be spent on green energy and digitalisation projects, such as connecting islands to the mainland electricity grid, 5G networks, and electric-car charging stations. "This money is for investments only. It's not for hirings or recurring expenses," Skylakakis said.

France, the Netherlands, and the European Commission are narrowing in on a deal to bailout Air France-KLM, according to French newspaper Le Monde. The deal is to include giving up slots at the Paris-Orly and Amsterdam-Schiphol airports to competing carriers in return for permission for billions in state aid. The airline group posted a loss of €7.1 billion last year due to the collapse in air-travel caused by the pandemic.

Belarus police detained some 245 people over the weekend for taking part in pro-democracy demonstrations, according to human-rights group Viasna. Organisers had called for a mass-scale rally on Saturday, but people turned out in small groups instead in order to try to avoid police violence, Germany's 'DPA' news agency said. The demonstrators have kept up activism since rigged elections in August last year despite brutal beatings and torture.

EU countries have extended the life of 'Irini', a naval mission to stop arms-smuggling to Libya and human-trafficking to Europe, until 2023. Turkish, French, and Italian military intervention in Libya have undermined the UN arms embargo, while some 3,700 people came to Italy from Libya so far this year. But the EU mission is useful in terms of intelligence-gathering even if it cannot stop arms violations, UN experts have said.

German consumers kept an extra €185 billion in their private bank accounts between January last year and January 2021 due to the pandemic, according to the German central bank on Sunday. Their savings pile has now reached €1.73 trillion and further hoarding was predicted by Germany's 'Ifo' think-tank, because lockdowns have left people with little to spend on. Banks are also less willing to give credit due to borrower-insolvency concerns.

The EU and Cuba have complained about US counter-terrorism sanctions on Havana imposed by former American president Donald Trump, whose "extra-territorial application ... are contrary to international law and commonly accepted rules of international trade," according to an EU statement Friday. The joint video-talks were led by two Spanish-origin EU officials - Javier Niño and María del Carmen Herrera Caseiro. The US sanctions have hit Spanish tourism operators in Cuba.

China has blacklisted three US and nine Canadian officials in retaliation against Western sanctions over its persecution of the Uighur minority. It has also urged Chinese people to boycott Western clothes-makers which complained about Uighur forced labour, including EU firms Adidas, Burberry, and H&M. It has also sanctioned UK and EU politicians. But all that will "only contribute to the growing international scrutiny of the ongoing genocide", the US said.

The EU has threatened further sanctions against the Myanmar junta after slayings of women and children, but Russia pledged allegiance to one of its top arms buyers.

The report singles out Hungary, Poland and Slovenia as the EU member states most prone to take advantage of Covid-19 responses in order to thwart democracy and weaken the rule of law.

An investigation by Corporate Europe Observatory has uncovered how new lobbying strategies, aimed at deregulating modern genetic techniques are driven by academic and biotech research institutes with corporate interests - utilising 'climate-friendly' narratives.

The Warsaw-based agency held out 105 days, refusing freedom of information requests, before it finally revealed a partial breakdown of costs linked to its annual European Border and Coast Guard Day. Such delays, on spending, tend to arouse suspicions.

Irrespective of whether or not the decision to pause the AstraZeneca vaccine was political, it is clear that governments around the world are not solely basing their vaccination rollout on scientific evidence.