Euobserver.com

"We don't see ourselves elsewhere but in Europe. We envisage building our future together with Europe," Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Saturday. He also extended the mission of a Turkish ship to look for oil and gas in Greek-claimed waters the same day until 29 November, however. Cyprus and Greece are calling for extra EU sanctions on Turkey in a move to be decided by EU leaders in December.

The World Health Organisation's special envoy on Covid-19, David Nabarro, said in Swiss newspaper Solothurner Zeitung on Sunday that Europe might face a third wave of the virus if they do not prepare for the future or relax their current lockdown measures too quickly. Solothurner Zeitung."Now we have the second wave. If they don't build the necessary infrastructure, we'll have a third wave early next year," he said.

In a statement Saturday, the EEAS spokesperson called the arrest of the director and several senior managers of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) in Cairo over the last few days "of significant concern", adding the EU has conveyed this message to the Egyptian authorities. The EIPR "provides a critical and invaluable service to the Egyptian people by promoting political, civil, economic and social rights" the statement said.

Police arrested about 300 people in Minsk on Sunday and attacked crowds with stun grenades, according to human rights group Viasna, after thousands came out in protest against rigged elections. The rallies marked the 16th weekend in a row of resistance. The EU is preparing to impose a third round of sanctions on the regime, but these will not be in place until mid-December, EU official say.

The French foreign ministry has vehemently denied Pakistan it was going to force Muslim schoolchildren only to have special ID numbers. The denials came after Pakistan's health minister tweeted the false information, comparing it to Nazi treatment of Jews in WW2, after she had found it in a misleading news article. The French denials also came amid heightened tensions after recent jihadist killings in France.

A panel at the World Health Organisation said the antiviral drug remdesivir was 'ineffective' in treating Covid-19. But tens of thousands of doses have already been distributed throughout the EU and a €1bn contract signed with Gilead.

Russia is the top naval power in the Mediterranean. Turkey is a rising one, and the West's "golden days" are over, according to Italy's former military chief.

Ahead of the next European summit in mid-December, MEPs will address the EU's long-term budget and rule-of-law conditionality in another virtual plenary session. Discussions will also focus on consumer rights, pharmaceutical strategy and the pandemic.

The European Ombudsman said the climate risks from gas projects included on the EU Commission's list of priority energy projects were not properly assessed, urging the commission to address the "shortcomings" of its methodology.

The Nagorno-Karabakh war shows the West needs to rebuild relations with Turkey and put forces in Georgia to prevent still greater conflicts, the former head of US forces in Europe says.

Imposing minimum wages and interfering in collective bargaining through binding legislation, not only means breaching EU treaties - there is also a serious risk that this will undermine successful labour market models that have delivered real wage increases for decades.

"There is light at the end of the tunnel, but it will be a tough six months," Hans Kluge, the World Health Organisation's Europe director, told press in Copenhagen on Thursday. "Europe is once again the epicentre of the pandemic, together with the United States," he said, with "one person dying every 17 seconds". Europe accounted for 28 percent of global cases and 26 percent of deaths, he said.

Regime-linked Belarusian tycoons are to face new sanctions, while EU-Belarus relations are to be cut to a minimum, according to an internal EU paper, seen by EUobserver.

French president Emmanuel Macron asked Muslim leaders on Wednesday to accept a "charter of Republican values" as part of a broad clampdown on radical Islam following a wave of Islamist terror attacks. The charter will state that Islam is a religion and not a political movement, and prohibiting "foreign interference" in Muslim groups. He gave the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) a 15-day ultimatum to accept it.

EU states plan to draw up a common military strategy, called a "Strategic Compass", on the model of Nato, according to officials and diplomats, Reuters reports. "This is a common way of looking at the world, of defining threats and addressing them together," an EU official said. The EU wanted "strategic autonomy", but that did not mean less cooperation with the US, EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said Thursday.

Outgoing US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Thursday, visited an Israeli settlement, Psagot, on occupied Palestinian land, in the first-ever such endorsement by a top American official. By contrast, EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said the same day in Brussels "Israeli settlement activities ... threaten the viability of a two-state solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflict, after speaking with Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Maliki and EU foreign ministers by video-link.

EU countries have rejected a small move towards using majority-voting, instead of consensus, in doing foreign policy. EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell had made a "modest" proposal to use votes when implementing details of a new action plan on human rights, but "member states did not agree", he said Thursday. The 35-page rights plan promises to protect LGBTI minorities, a hot-button issue for homophobic governments in Hungary and Poland.

Hungary's plans to import and possibly use Russia's Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine raises safety concerns and could damage trust in potential shots, the EU Commission said, according to Reuters. Hungary plans to conduct trials of, and possibly produce, the Russian vaccine. However, under EU rules, Sputnik V must be authorised by the European Medicines Agency before it can be marketed in the 27 EU members.

Russia could block YouTube, Facebook and Twitter for "censoring" content from Russian state media, according to draft legislation submitted to parliament Thursday, Reuters reports. The bill's explanatory note singles out those three social-media giants for having "censored" the accounts of Russian state-run news outlets including RT, RIA Novosti and Crimea 24 since April. Facebook and Twitter began labelling state-affiliated media accounts this summer, months after Alphabet's YouTube introduced similar labels.

German parliament president Wolfgang Schäuble outlined a vision on migration that included possibly sending people to "facilities outside Europe" while at the same time acknowledging that the EU is reliant on "dubious powers and regimes".