Euobserver.com

For European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans, the Common Agricultural Policy has to answer to "higher expectations" on climate action, protection of biodiversity and environmental sustainability, while ensuring a fair income for all farmers.

What will the new Joe Biden administration bring to the realm of digital policy, and how will it affect the relationship with the EU?

Hungary cannot accept linking EU funds to the rule of law, as it would make the EU like the Soviet Union, prime minister Viktor Orban said Friday, adding he had discussed the issue with German chancellor Angela Merkel. Orban said the link would be "blackmail on an ideological basis without objective criteria". Budapest cannot veto this legislation, but Hungary and Poland threatened to block the EU recovery package over it.

Time the for EU to help free the Sahawari people after 45 years of Moroccan occupation in the scorching desert because Spain once swapped them for a school of fish.

Doubts over rule of law in Poland or other EU states should not automatically prevent extraditions, a senior EU court jurist has said in a case brought referred by Dutch courts. Judicial cooperation between EU countries relied on "the principles of mutual recognition and mutual trust,"but suspension of extraditions was "an exceptional response that must correspond to exceptional circumstances," advocate general Manuel Campos Sánchez-Bordona said in a non-binding opinion.

"Scores, and likely hundreds, of people were stabbed or hacked to death in Mai-Kadra ... in the South West Zone of Ethiopia's Tigray region on the night of 9 November", international charity Amnesty International said in a report Friday, blaming the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), a rebel group. Hostilities between the TPLF and government forces recently broke out, including with air-strikes, prompting thousands of refugees to flee to Sudan.

A number of European countries have warned that it is too early to plan for Christmas travel, as coronavirus cases continue to rise across the continent, the BBC reports. Irish and French authorities said it was too soon to say if people could make travel arrangements. In Sweden, people have been told to prepare for possible travel restrictions during the holiday period.

Lithuania is expecting an EU reaction to the "shocking" death of a Belarusian man on Thursday.

Italy passed the symbolic cap of one million corona infections and more than 42,000 deaths, Il Corriere della Sera writes. Just as in during the first Covid-19 wave, hospitals are full in several regions. According to foreign minister Luigi Di Maio, in the city of Naples, "people have to be treated in their cars in the parking lots, while others are dying in ambulances because there is nowhere to go."

Five followers of the Danish racist "hate-preacher", Rasmus Paludan, have been ordered to leave Belgium, state secretary for asylum and migration Sammy Mahdi announced. Together with Paludan they were planning to burn a Koran in the Brussels Sint-Jans-Molenbeek municipality. The Danish far-right politician Paludan was arrested in Paris earlier this week in order to prevent his plans for a similar Koran burning.

At least 74 migrants and asylum seekers died off the coast of Libya on Thursday (12 November), in the latest in a series of at least eight other shipwrecks in the central Mediterranean since October. About 120 people, among them women and children, were thought to be on the boat heading towards Europe. At least 11,000 attempting to cross have been returned to Libya this year.

Eight members of an international peacekeeping force in Egypt's Sinai peninsula have been killed in a helicopter crash, while one person survived, the BBC reports. Six Americans along with a French national and a Czech national, all members of the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), did not survive the impact, which happened during a routine mission near Sharm-el-Sheikh. The MFO said it would investigate the cause of the incident.

The European Commission is about to sign a fourth contract for hundreds of millions of vaccine doses against Covid-19. The contracts include non-disclosure clauses, meaning things like price or even where they will be produced remains confidential.

The end of the Nagorno-Karabakh war is a new test for Armenia's young democracy and for EU ambition.

The EU Commission plans a proposal to ensure recognition children-parent relations in cross border situations, and legislation to support the mutual recognition of parenthood between member states.

EU states who invested in digital education were better able to protect students from the pandemic, a new report has said. Meanwhile, poor and rural pupils were worse off.

It's time for the European Union to rethink how it deals with migration and treats refugees and asylum-seekers. As it is, a father awaits sentencing for the death of his own son.

Thousands of people turned up to march in Warsaw on Polish Independence Day on Wednesday, despite earlier plans for them to drive through the capital city instead due to coronavirus restrictions. The event, which has become a magnet for far-right groups and hooligans in recent years, saw thugs throw stones and fireworks at police and at windows which displayed LGBTI flags, while police fired tear gas and rubber bullets.

European Union governments approved a €1 trillion green "roadmap" for the European Investment Bank (EIB) on Wednesday that will see it stop financing fossil fuel projects and airport expansions, Reuters writes. The €1 trillion is to be spent by 2030 on climate-, biodiversity- and sustainability-focused projects. The bank says "all financing activities" will also be aligned with the Paris climate agreement by the end of this year.

The first vaccinations against Covid-19 in the EU could take place in the first quarter of 2021 in an "optimistic" scenario, the director of the European agency in charge of epidemics was quorted by AFP. Andrea Ammon, director of the European Centre for Disease Control (ECDC) said the pandamic situation is "very, very worrying" and "all our indicators are going in the wrong direction."