Euobserver.com

The European Banking Authority (EBA), an EU regulator in Amsterdam, has said its email servers were accessed by hackers. "The EBA email infrastructure has been secured and our analyses suggest that no data extraction has been performed and we have no indication to think the breach has gone beyond our email servers," it said Monday. US tech firm Microsoft, which handles EBA mail, earlier linked the attack to China.

Ethiopia's war is being fought not just in a blackout, but also in a fog of lies, and Ethiopia's envoy to the EU is making matters worse.

The European Commission has expressed surprise over the Belgian government's decision to extend the ban on non-essential travel, stressing that "all options" are on the table to ensure free movement across the bloc.

Frontex is invoking EU interception rules, plus a European Court of Human Rights case against Spain, as precedents to allow authorities to turn back migrants in boats in the Aegean Sea. But legal analysis by the EU Commission says otherwise.

The US has enough doses to fully-vaccinate the region twice while other countries have ordered enough doses to vaccinate their populations four or five times over, which many have condemned as "vaccine hoarding", writes the speaker of the Tunisian parliament.

The Flemish nationalist party NV-A and the Francophone liberal party MR want to end Belgium's coronavirus curfew. In Brussels the curfew starts in the evening at 10PM, in the rest of the country at midnight. The Belgian government decided to keep the curfew, but to allow people to meet in groups of up to 10 persons in open air, starting Monday. There is disagreement on when to end the curfew.

Marta Lempart, one of the leaders of Poland's anti-abortion ban protests, has accused police of breaking the law on freedom of assembly on the direct orders of Polish ruling party chairman, Jarosław Kaczyński. "Policemen are breaking the law, stopping people, ID-ing them illegal, beating them. They're breaking the law on Kaczyński's orders and they will be held accountable for it," she told Polish news agency Onet.pl on Sunday.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said that she expects around 100m doses of vaccines to arrive in the EU in April and 300m by the end of June. "From April onwards, the quantities could double again according to the manufacturers' plans, also because further vaccines are about to be approved," von der Leyen said in an interview with German newspapers Stuttgarter Zeitung and Stuttgarter Nachrichten.

"I hope they [the EU] will shake off any remaining ill will towards us [the UK] for leaving, and instead build a friendly relationship, between sovereign equals," David Frost, a British government advisor on Brexit, wrote in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, amid a growing customs dispute over Northern Ireland. Britain's unilateral suspension of parts of the Northern Ireland deal was "lawful and consistent with ... good faith implementation", Frost said.

A senior official at the European Medicines Agency in Paris, Christa Wirthumer-Hoche, has told Austrian broadcaster ORF that it was premature for EU countries to start using Russia's 'Sputnik V' coronavirus vaccine. "We need documents that we can review. We also don't at the moment have data...about vaccinated people. It is unknown. That's why I would urgently advise against giving a national emergency authorisation," Christa Wirthumer-Hoche said Sunday.

A far-right proposal to ban facial coverings in Switzerland won a narrow victory in a binding referendum on Sunday instigated by the same group that organised a 2009 ban on new minarets, Reuters writes. The measure to amend the Swiss constitution passed by a 51.2-48.8 percent margin, provisional official results showed. The proposal does not mention Islam directly, but local politicians, media and campaigners have dubbed it the 'burqa ban'.

Out of the seven serious incident reports shared with this website, five deal with allegations against Greek authorities, while the remainder describe separate incidents in Germany and Hungary.

The pandemic has proven to be a major challenge for gender equality across Europe, where domestic violence and existing inequalities have exacerbated, a report has found. Meanwhile, domestic violence spiked during the spring of 2020 across Europe.

MEPs will give the green light for a more united EU health policy, a new investment plan, and debate the Covid recovery fund, which is yet to be unleashed. Lawmakers will also debate media freedom in Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia.

Nicknamed the "European bazooka", the €672.5bn coronavirus recovery fund gives EU states €312.5bn in grants and €350bn in loans - but some countries have already said they won't use these long-term loans, at very low-interest rates. Why not?

In 2019, of all part-time jobs in the EU, 73.8 percent were held by women. Without a clear policy on flexible career development, women always end up sacrificing their career with knock on effects for the quality of female employment.

A cross-European group of 52 former MEPs on Friday urged EU lawmakers to vote against a report that recommends lifting the immunity of current MEPs Carles Puigdemont, Toni Comín and Clara Ponsatí. The vote will take place on 8 March. The Catalan politicians fled to Belgium in late 2017 to avoid charges over the referendum on Catalan independence. They could face up to 25 years in jail, if convicted.

The EU has been accused of "hypocrisy and neocolonialism" by a former Seychelles official, among others, for proposing insufficient measures to tackle overfishing of yellowfin tuna, while being the largest fisher of the prized species in the Indian Ocean, The Guardian writes. Although the Indian Ocean is bordered by Africa, Asia, and Australia, the single biggest harvester of yellowfin in the area is the European Union.

Italy has blocked a shipment of 250,000 doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccine due to go to Australia, invoking an EU export authorisation scheme. Australia was not "a vulnerable country", Italy said, and its decision was due to a "persistence of the vaccine shortage in the EU and Italy," it added, The Guardian reports. The move was a "carte blanche for imitators" in other EU states, German MEP Bernd Lange said.

The EU will launch legal action against the UK over its decision, on Wednesday, to unilaterally suspend parts of the Brexit agreement dealing with Northern Ireland customs, European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič has said. "We are currently preparing it and it would be really something coming to our table very soon," he told the Financial Times newspaper on Thursday. The Birth move was a "very negative surprise", he added.