Euobserver.com

Spain's interior ministry said on Wednesday that 21 business figures linked to the Catalan separatist movement were arrested for alleged embezzlement, obstruction and money-laundering, the Associated Press reported. The investigation, which started more than a year ago, aims to clarify whether public funds were misused to fund the campaign for the illegal secession referendum led by former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, and his living expenses after he fled to Belgium.

Belgian microbiologist Peter Piot offered a bleak assessment of available options to rid the world of the pandemic caused by Covid-19. Aside from wishful thinking, millions of possible deaths, and crushing poverty, a vaccine appears to be the only solution.

Before the murderous Sudanese regime of Omar al Bashir was overthrown by a popular revolution, the Belgian government decided to cooperate with it - in order to deport Sudanese refugees.

Western experts and diplomats have agonised over how to help end the Belarusian crisis in a peaceful way, but ordinary Belarusians have their own ideas.

The European Commission proposed minimum standards to ensure adequate minimum wages all across the EU. But the proposal does not oblige member states to harmonise their systems, nor does it set a common minimum wage level.

Public opinion in Poland does not back a ban on women's access to abortion care - including parts of the electorate that PiS is supposedly representing.

The sincere and simple personality of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, currently the most famous Belarusian opposition leader in the world, is truly fascinating, writes Lithuania's minister of foreign affairs, Linas Linkevičius.

Poland's ruling party chairman, Jarosław Kaczyński, has said protests against his draconian anti-abortion laws would lead to deaths and that the feminist movement behind them wanted to destroy Poland. "These protests will inevitably end up costing many lives," he said in a video posted Tuesday. "This attack is aimed at destroying Poland, leading to the triumph of forces which ... [would] end the history of the Polish nation," he said.

A senior US official has verbally mauled the EU's new farm policy, over its focus on environmentalism and its anti-GMO stance. "Europe is choosing to export this philosophy and dictate to other countries around the world ... What do we say to our kids and our grandkids when famine and starvation sets in, and it will, it will," Ted McKinney, the under-secretary for trade and foreign agricultural affairs, said Tuesday.

The death toll from Covid-19 in Europe rose 40 percent last week, in a sign hospitals are struggling to cope, the World Health Organisation said Tuesday. "We're seeing an intense and indeed alarming increase in cases and deaths," a WHO spokeswoman told the BBC, highlighting figures in France, Spain, The Netherlands, and Russia. "Intensive care units in hospitals are now beginning to fill with very ill people," she said.

The Turkish president's recent call for a boycott of French produce over alleged Islamophobia was "contrary to the spirit" of EU-Turkey trade accords and would "take Turkey even further away from the European Union", a European Commission spokesman said Tuesday. The Turkish lira tanked in markets due to the dispute. But the Saudi foreign ministry echoed Turkey, saying it "denounced" France's "offensive" decision to defend the publication of Mohammed cartoons.

It has been 81 days since the first police cosh hit the first skull in Belarus and president Alexander Lukashenko has still not paid any EU price.

A report from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre on Tuesday found that 48 percent of Europeans use social media daily or almost every day. However, it identifies four challenges that emerge when citizens interact politically on these platforms without public oversight: "attention economy" that benefits advertisers, "choice architectures" based on behavioural techniques that encourages constant engagement, "algorithmic content curation" which can result in a polarised discourse and "misinformation/disinformation".

The dispute over control of the film and theatre school has generated global support with dozens of internationally recognised artists - including actresses Cate Blanchett and Helen Mirren and author Salman Rushdie - supporting the school and its autonomy.

Despite the coronavirus crisis, the European Commission wants member states to attract more than €20bn of investment in artificial intelligence (AI) annually over the next decade to make Europe a leader of so-called 'trustworthy artificial intelligence'.

In a quick U-turn, EU border agency Frontex says it has now launched an inquiry into allegations it may have blocked potential asylum seekers from reaching the Greek coast, in so-called 'pushbacks'. What form that inquiry will take is unclear.

The MEPs's report asked the EU Commission to "consider" labelling products and services according to their durability and estimated lifespan - but only to examine so-called "planned obsolescence." The parliament plenary will vote in November.

The decline of the US and the rise of China have immense consequences for Europe. Above all, it means that all member states must be committed to making enormous efforts to close ranks in terms of trade and security.

The Covid-19 crisis shook up the world profoundly, and we haven't found the politics to cope with it yet. That is the harsh but undeniable conclusion of a new parliamentary report by Renew Europe MEP Hilde Vautmans.

Boris Johnson hopes that the new partnership demonstrates to his counterparts on the continent that, despite quitting the EU, Britain will remain a key player in European security affairs via a commitment to upholding Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.