Euractiv.com

When he looks back on his youth in China's far-west Xinjiang region, Akikat Kaliolla, an ethnic Kazakh, recalls the place's natural beauty and the big, colourful weddings typical of his majority-Muslim community.  

MEPs voted in Strasbourg on Wednesday (3 October) in favour of a 40% CO2 reduction target for light vehicles by 2030. The target is higher than what the Commission has proposed and tough talks with national capitals now loom large on the horizon.

EU environment ministers will refer to limiting global warming to 1.5C, when they meet on 9 October, a day after the release of the much-awaited, landmark IPCC report, according to draft conclusions seen by EURACTIV.com.

Whatever the negotiation result of the revision of the electricity market design will be, the agreed framework for “capacity mechanisms” needs to be reviewed regularly due to the changing conditions of the European electricity sector, says Frank Umbach.

A big controversy is ongoing in Greece following reports that the country’s largest opposition force, New Democracy, which strongly opposes the name deal with Skopje, has had secretive contacts with the Prime Minister of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Zoran Zaev.

The automotive industry is moving ever closer in the mass development of connected cars, yet a number of challenges still exist for policymakers if the EU is to foster the development of the technology alongside fulfiling its long-term goal of zero fatalities by 2050 as part of its ambitious "Vision Zero" programme.

The prime ministers of Greece and Macedonia, Alexis Tsipras and Zoran Zaev, are among the favourites to become nominees for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, according to a Swedish journalist specialised in covering the secretive decision-making of the Nobel committee.

‘Eat, sleep, code, repeat,’ is the mantra in Andela’s Nairobi campus, home to a network of Africa's brightest coders. Taking the inspiration for its name from the late South African President Nelson Mandela, Andela invests in Africa’s software engineers.

Former Finnish prime minister Alexander Stubb declared his bid on Tuesday (2 October) to succeed Jean-Claude Juncker as EU chief executive, becoming the second candidate to lead the centre-right in European Parliament elections in May.

Talks on a new agreement between the ACP and the EU will only bear fruit if both parties take the road to prosperity together, writes the ACP's chief negotiator, Robert Dussey, on the post-Cotonou talks.

Russia has delivered an S-300 surface-to-air missile system to Syria, it said on Tuesday (2 October), in defiance of Israeli and US concerns that the arms sale would embolden Iran and escalate the Syrian war.

Russia regards as dangerous a statement by Washington's envoy to NATO who said Moscow must halt its covert development of a banned cruise missile system or the United States would seek to destroy it before it becomes operational.

La France Insoumise, the left-wing party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, wants to turn the European elections into a referendum against French President Emmanuel Macron’s politics and the European project he represents. EURACTIV France reports.

This October, the Conservative party’s conference in Birmingham has been dominated by the long shadow cast by the Brexit talks. Theresa May’s ministers have spent the week waging rhetorical war on Brussels, lining up to insist that the EU must be the first to blink.

The EU’s next Cohesion Fund for regional development should prioritise investments into waste management systems focused on prevention, re-use, separate collection and recycling – not on incineration, argues Janek Vahk.

Strahil Karapchanski, the deputy mayor of Ruse, the largest Bulgarian city on the Danube, told EURACTIV about the history, the present and his hopes for the future of cross-border regional cooperation with Romania, which he has helped to oversee.

Humans have been labelled an “indoor species” because of the amount of time we spend indoors. That is why there is a fresh drive to increase the healthy environment of the buildings where we spend the second biggest portion of our time: our places of work.

French EU Datathon finalist Open Food Facts plans to expand to other member states in a bid to overcome the language barrier and improve food information within the European union, vice-president Pierre Slamich told EURACTIV.com.

As Poland readies itself to welcome the world in December, the man tasked with organising the COP24 Katowice summit told EURACTIV how preparations are going for what is likely to be make-or-break climate talks for the Paris Agreement.

Whether it relates to electricity prices charged to customers, the calculation of grid availability across borders, or the EU’s law-making process itself, the quest for transparency has emerged as a cross-cutting theme in Europe’s ongoing power market reform.