European Union

US president Joe Biden has pledged to help Ukraine fight "Russian aggression", including with new arms supplies and potential sanctions against Nord Stream 2.

Slovenia's EU presidency will host an EU-Western Balkans summit in early October and its desire is to make these summits a regular annual event as a means of accelerating the EU enlargement process, Foreign Minister Anže Logar has said.

The World Health Organization is monitoring a new coronavirus variant called "Mu", also known as B.1.621, The Guardian reports. It was added to the WHO's watchlist on 30 August, after it was already detected in 39 countries. It possesses a cluster of mutations that might make it more resistant to vaccines. Presently, there are four variants deemed of concern by the WHO, including Alpha, Beta, and Delta variants.

A group of 15 NGOs announced on Thursday they will no longer accept invitations to media events that are sponsored by fossil-fuel companies in an open letter, addressing the editors of EURACTIV, the Financial Times, and POLITICO Europe. According to Greenpeace, 29 media events in 2020, and 2021 to date, were sponsored by fossil-fuel companies. EUobserver does not accept fossil-fuel or tobacco sponsorships.

Thousands of British modern-language students seeking visas in order to temporarily study or do internships in Spain, but also Germany, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, have faced bureaucratic and financial obstacles in the wake of Brexit, putting their plans at risk, The Guardian reports. The UK asked Spain to create a fast-track process, but it refused. One English student reported paying €816 for her Spanish visa application.

Russian importers of CO2-intensive products, such as steel, will pay some €1.9bn in fees by 2035 under the terms of a proposed EU carbon border tax, which might enter into force in 2026, but Chinese ones will pay far less - just €484m, according to a study by think-tanks Sandbag and E3G, Reuters reports. Ukrainian firms would be liable to pay €870m and Turkish ones €824m, the study noted.

Support for EU accession has dropped in Western Balkan countries after member states vetoed opening talks with North Macedonia, Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić said at a forum in Slovenia on Wednesday. "Enthusiasm for EU accession, not only in Serbia, isn't what it once was ... North Macedonia changed its name, and for this it had been promised the start of accession talks. Have those talks started? No," he said.

The European Commission said on Wednesday it was concerned about the environmental impact on the Mediterranean of the 20,000-tonnes oil slick that originated from a power plant in the Syrian town of Baniyas. According to AFP, the layer of oil has pulled away from the north of Cyprus thanks to shifting winds. An oil-recovery vessel was made available to Cyprus by the European Maritime Safety Agency.

The European Court of Justice on Wednesday annulled a decision by the EU anti-fraud agency not to grant partial access to its final report in an investigation into street-lighting projects, involving a company called Elios which used EU subsidies. The case, investigated in 2015, is politically highly-sensitive because István Tiborcz, the son-in-law of Viktor Orbán, Hungary's prime minister, was the co-owner of the company at the time of the investigation.

The EU wants to create safe passage routes out of Afghanistan towards Pakistan and other central Asian states in order to evacuate Afghan women's rights activists and others with similar profiles.

Emissions from shipping must be reduced further if Europe wants to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, the European Maritime Safety Agency warned in a new report. Projected increases in shipping emissions are incompatible with the bloc's 2050 net-zero target.

The reports showed that 22 percent of respondents say they still feel free in their everyday life now - compared to 64 percent who say they felt free two years ago, before the pandemic hit.

Biodiversity is fundamental to Earth's life-support systems humans depend on. But governments, financial institutions and policymakers have failed to act accordingly for decades.

For Brussels in particular, one lesson should be painfully clear: do not put all your eggs in one basket. Placing big bets on Biden cannot be a substitute for a strong and common European approach to international security.

The European Commission has given the green light to a new French state aid scheme worth €5.7 billion aimed at supporting the production of electricity from small solar installations on buildings. But because the scheme cannot be coupled with other local and regional funding schemes, citizen solar panel projects will probably grind to a halt. EURACTIV France reports.

Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) is often described as the invisible killer, mostly because patients have few or no symptoms until it is too late. On the practical level, this means that the disease, although devastating for both the individual and...

A court in the Spanish region of Murcia has opened an investigation against the ecological transition ministry over its alleged role in the environmental disaster in Mar Menor, a lagoon in southeastern Spain where tons of dead fish have washed ashore in the past week. EURACTIV’s partner EFE reports.

Facebook is reportedly extending the testing of making political content less visible in its News Feed to at least three EU countries following positive user feedback.

Afghanistan's new Taliban rulers struggled to keep the country functioning on Wednesday (1 September) after the final withdrawal of US forces, with foreign donors alarmed about an impending humanitarian crisis.

The European Union will need to engage with the Taliban but it will not rush into formally recognising the Islamist militant group as the new rulers of Afghanistan, a senior European Union official said on Wednesday (1 September).