European Union

In this year dominated by the coronavirus, women have played an instrumental part in getting European politics back on track. Commentators praise this development but also note that in other areas gender equality has lost ground rather than advanced.

European media discuss whether the global trend of nationalism and isolationism has peaked and begun to lose momentum in 2020.

For every single person the pandemic means a crisis that must be overcome. Many have lost loved ones and many have to fight for their economic survival, and compounding all this is the loss of normality and daily coexistence. A difficult situation - but also one that offers the possibility to reflect on what really counts.

President-elect Joe Biden said many of America’s security agencies had been “hollowed out” under President Donald Trump and the lack of information being provided to his transition team by the outgoing administration was an “irresponsibility.”

Gibraltar's chief minister Fabian Picardo has welcomed the post-Brexit trade deal between the UK and the EU, but warned it did not apply to his territory. "This deal does not cover Gibraltar. For us, and for the people of the Campo de Gibraltar around us, the clock is still ticking," Picardo said in a statement, reported the Associated Press. Gibraltar is a British colony off the southern coast of Spain.

The Paris-based international rights group Reporters Without Borders, on Monday, in a report, said that 50 journalists had been killed in the past year. It said most killings happened in countries not at war. "More journalists are being killed in countries considered to be 'at peace'," the report said. Most happened in Mexico, followed by India, the Philippines, and Honduras.

Talks had been stuck for years, but tensions between a Trump-led US and China may have helped change the Chinese position.

Saudi Arabia has jailed a prominent women's rights activist, Loujain al-Hathloul, despite a global outcry, including by European NGOs. The court sentenced her to over five years in prison after she was arrested in 2018 for campaigning for women to have the right to drive cars. And it aggravated Riyadh's human-rights pariah reputation, even though most EU states trade in arms and oil as normal with the Western ally.

Bruno Roger-Petit, an advisor to French president Emmanuel Macron, has defended having had lunch, in October, with well-known French far-right politician Marion Maréchal, after their meeting became public Sunday. "I wanted to know what she had to say and whether it echoed the state of [national] opinion - which it did not. I found out that we disagreed," Roger-Petit said Monday, after facing a barrage of criticism from liberal politicians.

The EU is still several months away from having enough vaccines to inoculate its 450 million people, with Pfizer and BioNTech, its principle suppliers, aiming for September for delivery targets.

Asylum seekers are living in misery in an EU-funded camp on the outskirts of Athens, with no running water or even containers to sleep in, nine months after construction began.

EU ambassadors of the 27 member states on Monday in Brussels approved the provisional application of the EU-UK trade deal struck last week. The 27 governments will now approve it in writing by Tuesday afternoon, a formal step before the agrement can enter into force next month. The provisional application will end in February as the European Parliament is expected to give the deal its final green light in January.

It was 20 February 2014, and snipers had just opened fire on protesters in Kiev, in the final act of a revolution which led, one day later, to the fall of Ukraine's pro-Russian regime.