Euobserver.com

The German EU presidency and European Parliament negotiators on Wednesday ended another unsuccessful round of discussions on the €1.8 trillion EU budget and coronavirus recovery package without a breakthrough. MEPs said they want an increase of €39bn in EU funds, but the presidency responded that the total final amount will be higher. MEP Johan Van Overtveldt then the council is not "going the extra mile" it had promised.

On the agenda of today's summit is EU-Africa relations. It is a bit of an 'orphan' item. Without a steer from EU leaders, policy-making on Africa will drift, proceed in silos and be more of the same.

Part Two of Investigate Europe's long-form examination of the EU gas industry looks at hydrogen - touted as the clean, green, future. But with NGOs sidelined, and industry leading the push, how sustainable is it really?

EU ambassadors agreed to blacklist six individuals and one entity on Wednesday for the poisoning of Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny. "No one raised any objections," a diplomat said. The sanctions enter into force Thursday morning when the names are published in the EU's legal gazette, the Official Journal. They include Aleksandr Bortnikov, the head of Russia's domestic intelligence, the FSB, and two Kremlin aides, the New York Times reported.

The European Commission adopted on Wednesday the EU chemicals strategy for sustainability, aimed at boosting safer and greener chemicals to protect human health and the environment. The controversial strategy includes a ban on the use of the most harmful chemicals in toys, childcare articles, cosmetics or detergents, developing sustainable-by-design criteria and introducing the "one substance, one assessment" principle to make the process simpler and more transparent.

The European Asylum Support Office (Easo) says the number asylum applications throughout the EU (plus Norway and Switzerland) dropped by 31 percent, when compared to the same period in 2019. A total of 295,075 applications for international protection have been lodged since the start of 2020. Easo says the drop is due to mobility issues and the pandemic caused by Covid-19.

Chinese authorities have tried to stop a French museum from referring to medieval ethnic Mongol leader Genghis Khan in an exhibition on Chinese history. The Château des Ducs de Bretagne museum in Nantes, France, was doing the exhibit together with a Chinese museum. And China's attitude amounted to "censorship" and "biased rewriting of Mongol culture in favour of a new national narrative", the French museum said, after suspending the installation.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has threaten to halt contacts with Western diplomats after the EU agreed to impose sanctions on Russia over the poisoning of opposition figure Alexei Navalny. "We probably simply have to temporarily stop talking to those people in the West who are responsible for foreign policy and don't understand the need for mutually respectful dialogue," he said at a congress in Moscow Tuesday, AP reports.

Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte announced yesterday that the Netherlands is going into "partial lockdown", due to the sharp rising numbers of coronavirus infections. From Tuesday evening, all bars and restaurants will be closed for at least one month. Buying alcohol after 10PM is forbidden. Hotels remain open, as well as bars and restaurants in the airport, after the security check.

Russia was guilty of a cyber-attack on Norway's parliament in August, the country's foreign minister Eriksen Soreide said on Tuesday. "Based on the information available to the government it is our assessment that Russia stood behind this activity", she said. Russia denied wrongdoing. The attack on what Soreide called Norway's "most important democratic institution" comes after similar accusations of a Russian cyber-sting on the German parliament in 2015.

A ban on using meat names such as "burger" or "sausage" for vegetarian products goes against consumers' choices for more sustainable food. Plant-based foods usually have a significantly lower climate and environmental impact compared to animal-based foods, such as meat.

It is often said that the British were the first to leave the European Union. This is, strictly speaking, not true: both Algeria and Greenland left the club long before Brexit came along.

In 2020 the world economy will contract 4.4 percent, and the eurozone economy by 8.3 percent, according to new estimates from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This is slightly better than the 4.9 percent prediction in June. Germany's economy will contract six percent, Spain 12.8 percent and Italy 10.6 percent. China's economy will grow by 1.9 percent. However, for 2021, the IMF expects eurozone growth of 5.4 percent.

The Spanish government is set to fine businesses up to €187,000 if they fail to reveal how they set base salaries and perks for employees, following a decree passed on Tuesday. The move is aimed at outlawing the gender pay gap between men and women in Spain, which is currently around 22 percent. Spain's labour minister Yolanda Díaz said the new rules were "historical."

European Parliament negotiators are demanding €39bn in new funding for EU programmes such as Horizon research and Erasmus, in talks with the German EU presidency on the budget. Meanwhile, rule-of-law enforcement negotiations have only just begun.

Since the German presidency promised the Conference on the Future of Europe would start under their leadership, the European Commission and MEPs hope the event will be launched soon. But there is one issue: who will chair the conference?

Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko has family connections to at least two firms in Cyprus, as EU states prepare to go after his money.

Cyprus has earned some €7bn from the sale of EU citizenship since 2013. Now it says it will scrap its scheme from next month, in the wake of an investigation by Al Jazeera news.

MEPs on the environment committee on Tuesday voted to increase green expenditure in the coronavirus recovery facility from 37 to 47 percent, and to exclude fossil fuel projects from receiving any funding from the package. 'Green' spending must be based on the EU's new sustainable finance law, MEPs said.

EU countries adopted on Tuesday common risk standards for restrictions on free movement in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, aiming to increase "transparency and predictability" for citizens and businesses. "It is our common duty to ensure coordination on any measures which affect free movement and to give our citizens all the information they need when deciding on their travel," said Michael Roth, Germany's minister for European affairs.