Euobserver.com

Attempts by Amazon staff to unionise were met with court action in Poland, while in the UK the online giant checked workers' Facebook profiles for union activity. Meanwhile, extra coronavirus risk-pay for staff ended in May in most countries.

With only five weeks to go before the UK severs all ties with the EU, chief negotiator Michel Barnier warned that the "same significant divergences persist" between the two sides in post-Brexit talks.

Despite the current challenges, we have good reasons to be positive. The Mediterranean region has the potential to rise and recover if we put in the means and efforts to address them together.

EU and British negotiators are preparing to resume face-to-face talks this weekend, the BBC reports, after a coronavirus infection scare saw them suspended, with the clock ticking before a no-deal British crash-out from the bloc's transition period on 31 December. EU negotiator Michel Barnier is also to hold talks with France, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands in Brussels on Friday on their objections to British fishing-right claims.

MEPs on Thursday backed a mini-trade deal with America that will see Europe drop tariffs on US lobsters in return for American concessions on EU exports of prepared meals, crystal glassware and cigarette lighters. The tiny move had symbolic value, coming as a first step in undoing a transatlantic trade war started by outgoing US president Donald Trump, with a whopping 638 EU deputies voting in favour.

An Iranian diplomat and a Belgian couple are due to go on trial in Belgium on Friday in connection with an alleged plot to bomb a rally held by an exiled Iranian opposition group in France, the BBC reports. The diplomat allegedly wanted the couple to bomb a rally of the Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in the French town of Villepinte, near Paris.

Turkey has jailed hundreds of people for life for taking part in the failed coup in 2016, but will EU leaders care when they decide on future relations?

US president Donald Trump said on Thursday he will leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for president-elect Joe Biden, the closest he has come to conceding the November 3 election, even as he repeated unfounded claims of massive voter fraud, Reuters reports. Biden won the election with 306 Electoral College votes to Trump's 232. The electors are scheduled to meet on December 14 to formalise the outcome.

The European Parliament on Thursday said that the Polish constitutional tribunal's ruling last month to ban almost all legal abortions "puts women's health and lives at risk". In a resolution adopted with 455 votes to 145 and 71 abstentions, MEPs said that the decision was made by "judges who are elected by, and are fully-dependent on, politicians from the ruling coalition led by the Law and Justice Party".

UN experts on Thursday called on police and border guards worldwide to ensure that their use of big data and technologies like artificial intelligence do not reinforce racial profiling. "It's a rapidly developing technological means used by law enforcement to determine, using big data, who is likely to do what. And that's the danger of it," Verene Shepherd, a member of the UN committee working on racial discrimination, told Reuters.

The European Court of Auditors concluded on Thursday that EU action has not led to the recovery of significant marine ecosystems and habitats, since the legal framework is "not deep enough" and EU funds rarely support the conservation of maritime species. EU auditors also warned that overfishing remains a problem, particularly in the Mediterranean. The 2030 biodiversity strategy aims to protect at least 30 percent of the EU sea area.

Four teenage students have been charged in France in relation to the killing of Samuel Paty, three of them for allegedly pointing out the teacher to his murderer, the Guardian writes. Three other pupils were charged with complicity earlier this month over the beheading last month of Paty, who had shown his students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad as part of a lesson on free speech.

Italian multinational oil and gas company ENI has a board member advising the EU's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell. The European Commission appears to have been kept in the dark over the affair until NGOs starting asking questions.

The joint statement by Hungary and Poland said the currently-discussed rule-of-law conditionality should be reduced in scope to "the protection of the financial interests" of the EU.

Social policies and the relationship between the EU and India will be at the heart of the next Portuguese EU presidency agenda, according to Portugal's secretary of state for European affairs Ana Paula Zacarias.

An internal power struggle has undermined the world's leading international security body since the summer. The OSCE is due to finally get new leaders in December but the unprecedented power vacuum has hit at a crunch time for hotspots worldwide.

South Korea reported 583 new coronavirus cases Thursday, the highest since March, as it grapples with a third wave of infections that appears to be worsening despite tough new social-distancing measures, Reuters writes. The government reimposed strict rules this week, only a month after they had been eased following the second wave. Now some experts say the government moved too early to relax those rules, in potential lessons for Europe.

French EU affairs minister Clément Beaune has complained, voicing "great concern", that the European Parliament (EP) was renovating its HQ in Brussels, while skipping meetings in Strasbourg on grounds of coronavirus. Beaune proposed moving more EP staff and functions to Strasbourg permanently and to buy a large new building there in a letter to EP president David Sassoli, which the French minister published on Twitter.

The European Commission has urged Poland not to abandon a treaty against domestic violence, as Warsaw continues to drift further from EU norms.

Greece, Italy, Malta, and Spain want clear rules on obliging other EU states to take in migrants who land on their shores.