Euobserver.com

The European Commission will unveil a reform of EU criteria for picking energy infrastructure projects for financial support - with a particular focus on hydrogen. However, green groups have warned of the risks of not excluding fossil fuels.

Today (15 December) I come to Brussels with a simple purpose: to present the credentials of my country, Montenegro, to become the next member state of the European Union, writes prime minister Zdravko Krivokapic.

Politicians mostly talk about shutting migrants out. That endangers migrants' lives and obscures an important truth: that Europe already relies on large numbers of migrants for farming and manufacturing.

Global tech firms, such as Facebook and Google, will face fines of up to 6 percent of turnover if they fail to swiftly take down hate speech, child pornography, or corona-disinformation from their platforms, under the EU's 'Digital Services Act', due out Wednesday, according to a draft of the bill seen by Reuters. Firms will also have to disclose who pays for ads and how their algorithms prioritise content.

Russian would-be assassins poisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny with novichok a second time as he lay in an induced coma about to fly to Germany, Western intelligence sources told The Times newspaper. They first did it by sneaking into his hotel room in Omsk, eastern Russia, and squirting the nerve agent onto his underwear so that it touched his skin, not by putting it in his tea, as first reported.

Four British warships armed with machine guns will stop and impound EU fishing boats which enter UK waters after 1 January, if there is a no-deal Brexit. The move evoked Britain's so-called 'cod wars' with Iceland in the 1970s, which saw fishing nets cut, ships rammed, and warning shots fired. Some members of the ruling British Tory party criticised the move as being unnecessarily aggressive toward Europe.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Friday it would be "disrespectful toward a very important Nato partner" if the US imposed sanctions over his purchase of a Russian air-defence system. News of the US move saw the Turkish lira fall further. German chancellor Angela Merkel also said Friday European Nato states and the US would discuss potentially restricting arms transfers to Turkey in new talks "in the Nato framework".

An Italian scientist, Ranieri Guerra, who works for the World Health Organisation (WHO) as well as the Italian government, requested the removal, back in May, from the WHO's website of a report which had severely criticised Italy's handling of the first wave of the pandemic, The Guardian reports. The 102-page report, "An Unprecedented Challenge: Italy's First Response to Covid-19", was published on 13 May, but vanished on 14 May.

A Russian pipe-laying barge, the Fortuna, accompanied by three tugboats and supply vessels, resumed construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in Germany's maritime zone Friday. Work on the pipe, which is 93 percent complete, stopped in December 2019 when a Swiss contractor halted operations due to threats of US sanctions. The US, and several EU states, believe the project is designed to increase Germany's energy dependence on Russia.

Four Azerbaijani soldiers were killed, Azerbaijan says, and six Armenian ones were wounded, Armenia says, in fresh clashes in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region in Azerbaijan. The violence came despite the presence of almost 2,000 Russian peacekeepers. Russia earlier said it would be "suicidal" for Armenia to resume fighting, but Yerevan blamed the incident on Azerbaijan. More than 5,000 soldiers and 140 civilians died in recent warfare, which ended 9 November.

Switzerland has joined EU sanctions on the Belarus regime by announcing asset-freezes and visa-bans on president Alexander Lukashenko and 16 others Saturday. "Switzerland is deeply concerned by the ongoing tensions and is calling for dialogue between the Belarus government and civil society," the Swiss government said. Some 300 people were detained in Minsk on Sunday after the 19th weekend in a row of protests against rigged elections in August.

On Wednesday, MEPs will vote on the seven-year EU budget file as a whole, and also on the rule-of-law conditionality

Its language and history give North Macedonia its identity for president Stevo Pendarovski, but, for Bulgaria, neither of them are real, in a dispute holding up EU enlargement.

Hirut Zemene is Ethiopia's ambassador to the European Union. She is demanding for "a balanced view and understanding" by the EU of the conflict in Tigray region. The country is vying for national elections in May.

A partial agreement has been reached to prevent the dissemination of terrorist content online, pushing companies like Facebook or YouTube to remove or disable access to this material within one hour.

Although the deal is much more a result of the unswerving positions of the Netherlands and the European Parliament than of the German presidency's negotiation skills, the success is an extremely important face-saving measure for Berlin.

You might have seen headlines about a majority in the Swedish parliament backing the 'Nato option'. But before you conclude that Sweden anytime soon will apply for membership - hold your horses! There is still a vast majority against.

The EU Commission president told leaders there is now a higher probability for no deal than a deal - although she did not want to give a percentage. Negotiations continue at least until Sunday.

After hours of negotiations, EU leaders agreed to increase the bloc's emission-reduction target to 55 percent by 2030. But Poland and Hungary made sure that member states give the final green light to future climate legislation by unanimity.

Belgium counted 600,397 coronavirus infections since the crisis started, the public health institute Sciensano announced, Le Soir reports. Today, 2,939 people are hospitalised, of whom 657 are in intensive care. The number of hospitalised people with Covid-19 had not fallen below 3,000 since October 20. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 17,692 people have died of the virus in Belgium.