Euobserver.com

EU leaders have agreed to blacklist Turkish officials and entities involved in gas-drilling in Cypriot-claimed waters at Thursday's summit. The names of those to be listed will be published in the next few weeks. But talk of harsher measures, such as an arms embargo or trade tariffs, was kicked forward until March at the earliest. The US has also decided to sanction Turkey over a Russia arms deal, Reuters reports.

Denmark's environmental agency has found that some of the mink the country recently exterminated and buried due to coronavirus-infection concerns had contaminated groundwater, according to Danish broadcaster Radio4 on Thursday. The ministry of agriculture, the same day, also admitted it had lost track of where some 4,700 tonnes' worth of the dead animals had been buried. The mink-cull fiasco has already seen one government minister resign.

There were three incidents of equipment failure at Belarus' new atomic power station since it began making electricity in November, Lithuania has warned.

Hungary and Poland have already announced on Thursday they will take the EU's new rule of law budgetary conditionality mechanism to the bloc's top court.

The European Commission should insert democratic and human rights safeguards into new rules for global tech firms such as Facebook or Google, 15 former EU leaders said in a joint letter to commission president Ursula von der Leyen Thursday, seen by Reuters. The commission is to publish two major bills on tech on 15 December. Signatories included former Dutch and Spanish leaders Jan Peter Balkenende and Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

The EU and US should jointly stand up to Chinese diplomatic bullying, the EU ambassador to China, Nicolas Chapuis, told an energy congress in Beijing Thursday, Reuters reports. "We need to have a common understanding to say 'No' to bullying and intimidation, coercive diplomacy, 'wolf-warrior' diplomacy," Chapuis said. "Freedom of navigation is essential. The South China Sea is not only a China issue, it is an international issue," he added.

The European Central Bank is to inject a further €500bn into its corona-relief bond-buying scheme, the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme, bringing the total to €1.85 trillion. It also extended the life of the scheme by nine months until March 2022 and the life of its super-cheap bank loans until June 2022, in a sign of how long the economic fallout of the health crisis is likely to continue.

Italian prosecutors have charged four men from Egypt's national security service with the kidnapping and murder of Italian student Giulio Regeni in Cairo in 2016. The upcoming trial, a rare moment of European accountability for Egypt, stands in contrast to France's recent state honours for Egyptian dictator Abdul Fatah al-Sisi. The Egyptian regime has vanished 2,723 people since 2015, according to the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, an NGO.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan indicated he and Azerbaijan president Ilham Alyiev would press other territorial claims in the region after recently conquering the Nagorno-Karabakh exclave from Armenia. "The struggle carried out in the political and military areas will continue from now on many other fronts," Erdoğan said at a victory parade in Baku Thursday, France 24 reports. The parade included Turkish drones which conducted air strikes against Armenian forces.

Jorge Domecq spent five years as the chief executive of the European Defence Agency before taking up a job as "Head of Public Affairs" at Airbus. He failed to properly notify the agency of his new job, breaching staff regulations.

The EU did not solve the financial crisis, nor fix terrorism or radicalisation. Unlike most other political groups, the ECR doesn't believe these are temporary difficulties, but rather the consequences of the path this Union has taken in recent decades.

Why did it take so long for the EU-Asean Strategic Partnership to be concluded? The answer is simple: the EU should have been quicker and more forward-looking in recognising Asean's geo-strategic strength. Still, better now, than never.

EU leaders agreed on Thursday on the importance of preparation for a successful deployment and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines "to ensure that the[y] are made available to people in the EU in good time and in a coordinated manner" - highlighting the need to counter disinformation. "The arrival of vaccines does not mean the end of the pandemic," they warn in a statement, adding the epidemiological situation remains "worrying".

The European Commission presented on Thursday a legislative proposal for a new battery regulation, intended to minimise their environmental impact with mandatory recycling targets. Within Europe, the demand for batteries is set to increase 14-fold by 2030, mostly driven by the electrification of transport and the development of energy grids. China is currently the biggest market for batteries, with a 50 percent share of the global demand in 2020.

Bucharest will host a new cyber-research centre designed to help protect European assets from foreign hackers, after a vote by EU states Wednesday. The European Cybersecurity Competence Centre will distribute EU project funds around Europe. "Romania's capital will take this task in a responsible and dedicated manner," its EU ambassador tweeted. Belgium, Germany, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, and Spain had also competed to host the new centre.

If the EU and UK clinched a last-minute Brexit deal, they could not ratify it by 1 January, when a transition period expires, because the EU had 35 legislatures, including regional ones, which needed to sign off on the 700-page accord, an EU diplomat said Wednesday. A "pragmatic" solution could be to designate the Brexit agreement an EU-level treaty, to be signed off by ministers at one stroke, he added.

Forty two journalists and media workers have been killed while doing their jobs this year, according to the International Federation of Journalists' annual tally, the Guardian reports. A further 235 are in prison in cases related to their work, the report showed. Mexico topped the 2020 list of countries where the most journalists were killed for the fourth time in five years, with 13 killings, followed by Pakistan with five.

France is to tighten restrictions on clandestine home-schooling and online hate speech under a new bill approved by the French cabinet Wednesday, in reaction to recent jihadist killings. It will also extend bans on wearing religious symbols by state employees and restate a ban on polygamy. The "law of protection" was "not aimed against religions or against the Muslim religion in particular", French prime minister Jean Castex said.

The probability of no deal has increased as a last-ditch effort by British prime minister Boris Johnson and EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen did not bridge gaps.

EU leaders will agree to blacklist Turkish officials at Thursday's summit, but more "hawkish" steps, such as an arms embargo, are "off the table" for now.