Euobserver.com

The European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday demanded reciprocity from the UK over vaccine exports. "We are still waiting for doses to come from the UK... we want to see reciprocity and proportionality in exports, and we are ready to use whatever tool we need to deliver on that," she said. Some 10 million doses have been exported from EU plants to Britain, she said.

In February 2021, global warming rose approximately 1.19 Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Experts estimate that the 1.5 degree increase limit set in the 2015 Paris Agreement will be reached in 2034 if warming continues on the past 30-year trajectory. The signatories to the Paris Agreement represent around 79 percent of global emissions.  

The EU should start spending its €750bn pandemic recovery fund and may need to top it up later, a senior European Central Bank official has said. "It's possible the European support plan proves insufficient, but that debate is premature ... What matters now is that the European funds that have been approved are paid out as quickly as possible," bank board member Isabel Schnabel told the Les Echos newspaper.

Russia interfered in the 2020 US elections to try to help former president Donald Trump win, according to a US intelligence report out Tuesday. "Russia ran a successful intelligence operation that penetrated [Trump's] inner circle" in a campaign which "laundered misinformation into our political system with the intent of denigrating now president [Joe] Biden, damaging his candidacy", the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said.

China is refusing to let EU diplomats conduct a "meaningful" visit to Xinjiang, while claiming EU sanctions over its Uighur persecution are based on "lies".

Britain, the EU, and Norway have reached a three-way deal on how much cod, haddock, plaice, whiting, herring, and saithe each can catch in the North Sea in the wake of Brexit on Tuesday. The pre-deal chaos had hit Danish fishermen the worst. "Danish fishermen will have access to Norwegian waters again ... Now they can actually make money again," Danish Fishermen Organisation Kenn Skau Fischer said, Reuters reports.

French authorities are investigating a new coronavirus mutation that has been detected in eight people in a hospital in Brittany western France, Reuters reported on Tuesday. It is still unclear if the variants may evade some testing, as patients had negative results from PCR tests, which then returned positive from blood samples or those taken from deep in the respiratory system. International agencies have been notified about this new variant.

British prime minister Boris Johnson said on Tuesday the UK will prioritise diplomatic engagement with Asian countries as he unveiled a major shift in the country's foreign policy and defence priorities after Brexit. Johnson wants the UK to become a bigger player in the region, adding that he wanted a balanced approach to China. Johnson will also travel to India next month for his first major international visit since Brexit.

Belgian authorities on Tuesday arrested a Kosovo war crimes suspect, Pjetёr Shala, reports Reuters. Shala has been indicted by prosecutors at a special court in The Hague. The court is probing war crime allegations linked to Kosovo's 1998-1999 war for independence.

Britain will grow its nuclear warhead stockpile by more than 40 percent as it faces new technological threats, prime minister Boris Johnson said, Reuters reports. The country had previously been reducing its nuclear weapons stockpile, with a cap of 180 warheads for the mid-2020 period. Johnson scrapped the limit saying the number would now rise to a maximum of 260.

Covid has cut the number of high-frequency long-haul flight routes out of Europe from 61 to 19, according to data published by air-traffic control agency Euroclear Tuesday. 'High-frequency' routes mean three or more return flights between two airports in the same day. All high-frequency routes between Europe and Africa or South America were wiped out. Some 21 percent of long-haul routes (short or high-frequency) were wiped out entirely.

The European Medicines Agency has said that the benefits of AstraZeneca's vaccine continue to outweigh the risks - suggesting countries can continue using the British-Swedish jab. Several member states have suspended its use over blood-clot concerns.

The Hungarian tax initially imposed a rate of 50 percent of sales on the biggest networks. Critics saw this as an attack on RTL Klub, the country's most-watched commercial broadcaster, and as a way of undermining the free press.

Several hundred Frontex guards could be armed by the summer and deployed to EU member states that host its operations. An agreement has already been reached with Greece, says Frontex, the site of its biggest operation to date.

The NGO Klimaatzaak [Climate Case] is taking the Belgian, Flemish, Brussels and Walloon governments to court for breaching their climate obligations, arguing that inadequate climate policy constitutes a violation of standard of care, and human and children's rights.

For years, the EU's "united in diversity" motto has allowed policymakers to claim that conversations on race, religion, colour and ethnicity are foreign to European culture. But a colour-blind Europe is a fairy tale.

Listening to European citizens should be a permanent and continuous process - not merely limited to one event which starts on 9 May 2021 and is to finish before the presidential elections in France in the spring of 2022.

The European Commission and BioNTech/Pfizer agreed on Tuesday on accelerating the delivery of 10 million doses during the second quarter of 2021 (April to June). These would be drawn forward from the 100 million additional doses scheduled to be delivered later this year. "These accelerated 10 million doses will bring the total doses of BioNTech/Pfizer in Quarter 2 up to over 200 million," said commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

In Belgium, the coronavirus numbers are going up again. More than 500 people are now in intensive care, which is the highest number since 28 December, De Standaard reports. The number of people admitted to hospitals rose this week by 14 percent, while the number of infections went up by 21 percent. The amount of deaths on the other hand went down by 9 percent.

An Austrian official who chaired the EU Commission's vaccination advisory board, Clemens Martin Auer, has resigned after being verbally masked on radio by Austria's health minister Rudolf Anschober. The official had failed to inform his government there were millions of extra doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine available to purchase and tendered his own resignation, the minister said, amid discontent over the government's handling of the inoculation programme.