Euobserver.com

Next week's plenary of the European Parliament will take place in Brussels, after French authorities declared the Lower Rhine department a coronavirus 'red zone'. "While we are very disappointed about this decision, we have to consider that the transfer of the administration of the European Parliament would entail quarantine for all staff upon their return to Brussels," said the president of the parliament, David Sassoli, in a statement.

The Chinese video-sharing social networking platform TikTok joined on Tuesday the EU code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online. "The EU needs robust cooperation with such prominent actors to make the digital environment a safe place for all," said commissioner for justice, Didier Reynders. Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Dailymotion and Jeuxvideo.com are also part of the code of conduct, which was launched in 2016.

The European Commission on Tuesday announced a proposal for the European Council and European Parliament to reduce tariffs between the bloc and the US. Such reductions would increase access to both EU and US markets by around €200m yearly. If adopted, the deal will allow a decrease of US tariffs on EU exports worth around €136m a year. This will put into effect an agreement reached in August.

EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday announced MEP Mairead McGuinness as the new Irish commissioner. If the European Parliament now approves McGuinness for the post, she will take charge of the financial services, financial stability and capital markets portfolio. Commission vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis will take over trade after previous Irish commissioner Phil Hogan resigned last month over the 'golfgate' scandal. McGuinness is a current parliament vice-president.

Stopping the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Russia over its poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny is being considered by German chancellor Angela Merkel, her spokesman said Monday. "Yes, the chancellor agrees it is wrong to exclude anything," he said, referring to the option. But any accusations that Russia tried to kill Navalny using a chemical weapon "are unacceptable to us and essentially absurd," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Serbia and Kosovo are fully committed to EU talks, Brussels has said, despite a rival US process that caused irritation on Israel.

Spain becomes the first country in Western Europe to register 500,000 coronavirus infections on Monday, after a second surge in cases that coincided with schools reopening, Reuters writes. Spains's health ministry data showed a total of 525,549 cases on Monday, up from 498,989 on Friday, and 2,440 infections registered in the last 24 hours. Spain updates its data retroactively, so the latest numbers could be revised.

The European Commission wants to raise the EU's climate target for 2030 to 55 percent, German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes. Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is to announce this in the middle of next week in the annual speech on the "State of the European Union" before the European Parliament. So far, the EU had promised a 40 percent reduction of emissions in 2030 compared to 1991.

A whistleblower who exposed massive bribery at a Monaco-based oil firm is now being hunted in Europe - in a test of its extradition system.

Parliament president David Sassoli is to make the final decision on travelling to Strasbourg ahead of the leadership and parliamentary group chairs meeting on Thursday.

Amnesty International is demanding a criminal investigation into the treatment of migrants and refugees by Malta. The demand comes on the back of a report by the NGO that details the island state's efforts to stem migrant arrivals.

While a new internal market bill reported to "override" the legal force of the Brexit withdrawal agreement on critical issues, the UK government also set a surprise 15 October deadline to agree a post-Brexit trade deal with the EU.

There is only one woman among Italy's most-powerful politicians: Giorgia Meloni, 43, president of Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy), an ultra-conservative party allied with Matteo Salvini's League and Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia (Forward Italy).

In the last months, there has been a very concerning rise of racist attacks of the far-right in Portugal.

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on Monday called on countries worldwide to invest in public health to be better prepared for the next pandemic, Reuters reported. "History teaches us that outbreaks and pandemics are a fact of life. But when the next pandemic comes, the world must be ready - more ready than it was this time," he told a news briefing in Geneva.

In a final ruling, a Saudi court has sentenced five men to 20 years in prison, plus three men to 7-10 years, for being involved in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, NRC writes. The court changed the death sentence of the five men to 20 years after that the son of Khashoggi had said he pardoned the killers.

Alexei Navalny has been taken out of an induced coma and is responsive, the Berlin hospital treating the Russian opposition figure said on Monday, Deutsche Welle reports. The hospital added that Navalny was responding to speech but "long-term consequences of the serious poisoning can still not be ruled out." German chancellor Angela Merkel last week said the anti-Putin activist was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.

Masked men snatched the leading Belarusian opposition figure, Maria Kolesnikova, from the street in the centre of the capital, Minsk, on Monday and drove her away in a minivan, the Guardian writes. Kolesnikova was one of the campaign leaders of the opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. President Alexander Lukashenko claimed victory in the election, triggering daily protests. The EU has stated the elections results are not valid.

"The attitude shown by the EU in the eastern Mediterranean will be a test of sincerity from the perspective of international law and regional peace," Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said after a phone call with EU Council head Charles Michel Sunday. But an EU official told Bloomberg "all measures" were on the table, in terms of EU sanctions against Turkish oil and gas drilling in Greece-claimed waters.

"We came in after a government and negotiating team that had blinked and had its bluff called at critical moments and the EU had learned not to take our word seriously," British Brexit negotiator David Frost told the Mail on Sunday ahead of a new round of talks this week. The UK would "move on" if there was no post-Brexit trade deal by mid-October, British prime minister Boris Johnson said.