Euobserver.com

A Paris appeals court on Thursday upheld an order for Google to negotiate with media groups in a dispute over revenues from online news, AFP reported. The ruling came as the US internet giant said it was close to a deal on compensating French media groups for news shown in Google search. Google has so far refused to comply with new EU rules giving more copyright protection to media firms.

Germany recorded more than 4,000 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, with health minister Jens Spahn calling the latest numbers "alarming", according to DPA newswire. Top health officials warned of a second wave that could be more severe than the one in the spring. The numbers showed 4,058 new infections, compared to 2,828 on Wednesday.

A crossparty group of British MPs urged the government to consider removing Huawei from the country's 5G networks as soon as 2025 saying there is "clear evidence of collusion" between Huawei and the Chinese state.

According to the World Health Organisation, poor mental health claims the lives of 140,000 people per year by suicide in the European region. Their lives could be saved if mental health care and support were properly funded.

While the leaders of Greece's Golden Dawn facing lengthy jail terms, the atmosphere remains tense in Athens and some other parts of Greece. Depending on the exact sentencing, further clashes between anarchist-leftists and remnants of the extreme-right may ensue.

The European Commission signed on Thursday its third contract for a potential Covid-19 vaccine, with the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson. The deal will allow member states to purchase vaccines for 200 million people - with the possibility to extend that to an extra 200 million doses. The commission has previously sealed deals with AstraZeneca and Sanofi-GSK, but it is also negotiating with CureVac, BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna.

The European Commission signed on Thursday a €70m joint-procurement contract with the pharmaceutical firm Gilead for the supply of up to 500,000 doses of Remdesivir - the only medicine with a marketing authorisation in the EU for the treatment of Covid-19 patients needing oxygen. All EU and EEA countries, the UK, as well as six candidate and potential candidate countries are participating in this joint procurement.

Cambridge Analytica, the British data-mining firm disgraced for meddling in US elections, did not abuse information to steer the Brexit debate or help Russia to influence British voters, Elizabeth Denham, the UK's information commissioner, said Wednesday, following a three-year investigation. The firm's power "may have been an exaggeration" used by its own marketing, she said. Cambridge Analytica pitched to work with Ukip, a pro-Leave party, but was never hired.

EU foreign relations chief Josep Borrell has said plans by Northern Cyprus to re-open a beach in no-man's land from the 1974 war there was a "serious violation" of previous UN deals. The EU was to call on Turkey, which controls Northern Cyprus, to stop its proxy, Borrell said. And the beach dispute would make an EU-Turkey accord on oil and gas rights in the region "more difficult", he said.

Germany, the Czech Republic, Estonia, and Latvia are to recall their ambassadors from Minsk, the Lithuanian foreign ministry said on Wednesday. The moves come in solidarity with fellow EU states Lithuania and Poland, whose embassies in Minsk were all-but shut down by the regime, which accused them of meddling in its internal affairs. The EU recently blacklisted 40 Belarusian officials amid a brutal police crackdown following election rigging.

The foreign ministers of France and Germany said in a joint communiqué Wednesday they had proposed EU sanctions on Russians deemed guilty of poisoning opposition leader Alexei Navalny with a chemical weapon. "These proposals will target people whom we consider responsible for this crime," they said. They did not mention stopping a Germany-Russia pipeline, as some German MPs had called for. The UK said it would join the Franco-German measures.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is escalating and there is little the EU can do about it, its top diplomat has said.

Italy on Wednesday made it obligatory to wear face masks outdoors nationwide to stop the spread of coronavirus, Reuters reported. Italy, which was one of the most-affected countries in the EU during the first wave, has been recording fewer new cases than some of its neighbours, like Spain or France. Italy's health ministry recorded 3,678 new Covid-19 cases in 24 hours - exceeding the highest daily tally since April.

The World Bank said on Wednesday the coronavirus pandemic may push 150 million people into extreme poverty by the end of 2021, Reuters reported. According to bank president David Malpass, this would mean "a serious setback to development progress and poverty reduction". Meanwhile, the estimated 8.4-percent extreme poverty rate recorded in 2019 had been expected to drop to 7.5 percent by 2021 - until the coronavirus pandemic.

The European Commission published on Wednesday its second set of reports on action taken by signatories to the Code of Practice on Disinformation in fighting fake and misleading coronavirus-related information during August. However, EU commissioner for values and transparency Věra Jourová said "more work remains to be done to increase transparency and improve accountability". The EU executive urged the signatories to provide more complete and detailed quantitative data.

A large majority of MEPs back an initiative to streamline the EU's tools on protecting rule of law and democracy and have effective sanctions. They also backed a tough stance on the rule of law conditionality in budget talks.

The European Parliament plenary on Thursday is set to vote on a joint resolution on "the situation of Ethiopian migrants in detention centres in Saudi Arabia." The largest political group, the EPP, is against a common position.

The European Parliament voted in favour of a 60-percent emissions-reduction target by 2030 in the first-ever EU climate law. MEPs also supported an interim 2040 target, and making the EU's 2050 climate-neutrality target binding for each member state.

How do we actually want to improve the precarious situation of millions of people with Romani background in Europe, when political leaders in the countries with some of the highest Romani populations openly nourish anti-gypsyist stereotypes, like in Hungary?

The European Commission claims that it evaluates all member states objectively. In that regard, its new rule-of-law report is a manifest failure.